Why You Need A CDN For Your WordPress Blog? [Detailed Guide

When it comes to running your website, speed and performance are the 2 main factors that you need to take care of the most. Indeed, there are many ways to keep the numbers high for these 2 important website factors.

As a website owner, you could choose a reliable hosting provider, go with a lightweight WordPress theme, optimize all the images on your website, and so on. The list won’t end but one of the quickest ways to improve your website speed is by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) solution for your website.

A content delivery network for WordPress can make websites run efficiently, thus saving up server resources and making it easier for websites to handle higher amounts of traffic. But why does a website need a CDN, and does all websites need to have content backed by the content distribution network?

Well, we are going to answer all these questions in this article. Once you are done reading this article you will be able to know which CDN platform is best for their websites.

What is a CDN and How Does it Work for Websites?

Before we go any further, we need to explain the working of the CDN to truly show how important it is and why it needs to be on the website in the first place.

For example, when a user comes to your landing page, they are taken to your website’s host server. Now the host server of a website could be located anywhere in the world, geographically speaking. The server is being accessed by thousands of users who are currently going through your website content.

As a result, the high volume of traffic on one server could make it sweat and make it underperform. As a result, your website will start to take more time than usual to fully upload a webpage. It has been a well-known fact that users don’t wait for the website to load up.

If a website is even half-a-second slow, users will leave it and open some other one that is faster. Yes, even milliseconds of site load time matter.

Users visiting and frequently leaving leads to low conversion rates, which can be traced by Google bots, ultimately leading a website to go down on the SERP rankings. As a result, it will be hard for you to earn some money using affiliate links from your blogs.

With a network of servers spread across the globe, users can get the website’s content from the server, which is nearer to their geographical location. Thus, the load times will be low and developers can take advantage of it by delivering specific content to users from one particular region.

Benefits of Using a CDN On Your Website

1. Better Website Performance

A high-performing website will help provide high conversion and increase the number of sales. On the other hand, if latency and speed issues arise, it will make the website cripple and cause huge damage to online business. A well-maintained CDN ensures that website load times are minimal and all the transactions made online are as seamless as possible.

2. Global Reach

One-third of the world’s total population is connected to the internet. These numbers show the increase in online traffic over the past 15 years, and we will likely see more people coming online in the next few years.

A CDN works with cloud acceleration in collaboration with local POPs. The collaboration will cause the elimination of any latency that could arise due to long-distance online transactions.

3. All Time Availability

CDN websites don’t have to worry about facing downtime as the distribution of the website’s assets is spread over many regions. In addition to this, most CDNs come with automatic server detection, which provides instant redirection.

As a result, websites backed by CDN enjoy 100% availability even if there is a massive power outage, some hardware issue on one of the server locations, or the network is having problems.

4. Protection from DDoS Attacks

DDoS is one of the oldest and most used cyber-attacks that can easily deter a brand’s reputation, which has been victimized. Whenever someone puts their account details to make a purchase online, they are doing it by keeping their faith in the website.

With the use of CDN, websites get an extra layer of cybersecurity. It is designed to stop DDoS attacks from coming near your website’s data center, thus keeping your website running safely at an optimal speed.

5. Analytics

Analytics that you receive from CDN are priceless. These help distribute content to various users, and keep a close eye on user interaction with the content, and also provide website owners with crucial data about how their content is performing.

A content delivery network can also offer real-time analytics, optimize the speed of the website according to traffic, display the active regions of the website, point out which of the assets present on the website has more engagement, and more.

These analyses are undoubtedly helpful for developers to further optimize the content and make it more approachable to new users. The in-depth reporting of the user engagement will ultimately lead to better website performance, leading to a higher ranking in the SERPs.

8 Top CDNs for Your Website in 2022

1. MaxCDN/ StackPath

We are starting our list with MaxCDN, which StackPath is buying. It is the best CDN WordPress provider in the market. All the servers that the company uses are equipped with fast solid-state drives, which causes both the read and write memories to be faster than other servers offering the same set of features. Its data centers are spread all over the globe.

Features

It is super easy to install on your WordPress site, and it works in harmony with tons of popular WP caching plugins, such as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.
The control panel is easy to navigate and customers who are using it for the first time won’t feel overwhelmed by its user interface.
It comes with the SSL certificate, so the website has the best data encryption, and all the cached content will be opened through an SSL/HTTPS secure network.

The starting price of MaxCDN is $9 per month, and it can go up to $50 based on the website’s requirements. Users have the freedom to decide which CDN package they want to choose, along with choosing monthly and annual payments. We think it’s a clear winner as it packs so many features.

2. Cloudflare

If you are after a free global CDN system that can protect your website from DDoS attacks and make it function optimally, then Cloudflare is the one for you.

Cloudflare provides a highly available global content delivery system to its users, which has layers of security measures built inside of it. It’s a concept that couples both high-speed performance with intense data protection measures. It is relatively new though.

Features

There is no meter for the mitigation to the DDoS protection server.
Provides a shared SSL certificate to its users.
If there’s an attack on the website, everything will be locked up, and “I’m under attack” mode will launch automatically.
In case you have already secured an SSL certificate, you can upload it to their system.
Flaunts one of the best customer support services in the market. Available 24/7.
There is no need to change the website code to use Cloudflare’s CDN.
For business users, there’s an enterprise plan which adds 4 to 7 different layers of protection.

The preloader, which is present in their CDN, will pre-cache the most popular web page from the website to make the load times as fast as possible. On the other hand, if Google Analytics has some issues, Cloudflare CDN will notify the user and provide the necessary information on how to fix it.

The pricing starts at $20 per month, and there is a free option, too. So make sure you check that out first before going for the paid version. In our research, we found out that web hosting companies like Bluehost and SiteGround offer Cloudflare’s CDN services for WordPress when someone buys a hosting service from them.

3. Your Web Hosting CDN

Well, there is no denying the fact that even WordPress has come up with a robust CDN system of its own. It’s an excellent option for those who are looking to use CDN for their blog and don’t want to pay a lot each month. Rather than looking for some free solutions, CDN users can take the opportunity and use the CDN of their web hosting company.

There are 2 leading WordPress hosting companies that you should definitely check for buying WordPress web hosting along with CDN services. Both Kinsta and WPengine include CDN in their web hosting packages to make things easier for newcomers.

4. Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a CDN service that you can get from Amazon Web Services. AWS is a massive collection of cloud computing platforms from the e-commerce giant. CloudFront has a global network of 215 edge locations, which is spread over 46 countries and over 89 cities.

The areas which get the most coverage from this CDN provider are North America and Europe. In addition to this, CloudFront is spread in different Asian countries, and its servers are located in 57 locations across Asia.

Features

The CDN service will handle every single content type you will ever need. It can handle simple static objects to complex dynamic files with ease.
There are smart data handling tricks, such as Gzip. Brotli compression is used in this CDN service to optimize the website’s speed.
CloudFront can also manage video streaming websites like Hulu and PBS, and it does take care of the fast loading time of Amazon’s own video streaming platform, Amazon Prime.
In case you are already a member of the company’s storage platform, then you can transfer the data from there to CDN without paying any extra cost.

If you are not sure if the CDN service is suitable for your website or not, you can try it out for free with CloudFront as Amazon allows 50 GB per month of free content delivery for 1 year. After that, you can decide how you want to use the service and pay accordingly.

There is no flat-out rate for the usage like other CDN services. Thus, Amazon provides a simple monthly calculator to help customers know how much they will be spending each month. The CloudFront prices vary from region to region, so users need to calculate the pricing first before going for it.

5. Rackspace

When a customer is using Rackspace, they can upload massive files in small chunks and then get them downloaded from their server as one file. This feature is pretty helpful when your website has tons of videos on it.

Rackspace provides 99.99% of uptime no matter what. As a result, you can be sure that all the files present on your website will be available for users all the time.

Features

Uploads files on the server using 3 different storages, meaning the file is broken into chunks and stored in different physical locations, so in case of physical damage to the server, the files can be retrieved from the other 2 servers.
Each server system has 2 power supply units to keep servers working all the time, even if the location has a power cut.
It has data centers across the world and in major metropolitan cities like London, Hong Kong, and Sydney. As a result, users can easily fetch the website information from their nearest located server in milliseconds.

The starting price of using Rackspace is $0.10/GB per month. From there, users can select different options based on the server location and the type of CDN service they require.

6. Sucuri

For some, Sucuri is a well-known company that provides high-end website security to its clients. 2 of their main products are WordPress firewall and CDN service. Both of these are capable of protecting websites from DDoS attacks, malware, spam ware, and other threats that could take down the WordPress website.

Features

The firewall which you get with Sucuri CDN, scans all the requests which the website server gets from users, to access the data.
The Anycast server deployed by Sucuri around the globe helps users from different locations to connect with their fast servers in an instant.

Sucuri Firewall and its CDN services can hugely benefit website owners giving them better uptimes and protecting data from getting leaked. Also, Sucuri’s firewall can work with different CDNs as well. One of them is MaxCDN.

7. Bunny CDN

Bunny CDN claims to make your website’s load time 3x faster, and most of this claim has to do with the location of their data centers as Bunny CDN has 49 PoP, and all of them are working with tier 1 networks.

The backend technology of this CDN service is astonishingly great. With 18 Tera bytes per second of network capacity, users can upload heavy files to their server without worrying about slow loading times.

Features

Most of its NGINX servers use SSD to store the website data.
Uses HTTP/2 protocol instead of HTTP 1.1.
For geo IP routing and DNS, Bunny CDN uses the Anycast technology in all their servers.
The average connection time from the server is 20.00 ms.
Customer support is excellent, and within 2 hours, customer representatives will get in touch with users to solve the issue.

Bunny CDN uses the same pay-as-you-go option for users and allows them to pay even in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as well. All the privacy options which users can implement on a website are GDPR compliant.

8. CDN77

This CDN Service provider is a bit new if you look at other providers on this list. But don’t you think for a second that it’s of no use to you. CDN77 has quickly gained the reputation of being a reliable CDN service across the globe, partially due to its customer-centric approach.

The company has a motto to give users fair and complete transparency in their business. CDN77 adds a massive boost to load times and increases the overall performance of each page present on the website.

Features

The integration process of CDN77 is pretty simple and well documented, and even a non-technical person can quickly install it on their website and start using it.
Once the installation and deployment are done, users can manage the CDN services using the control panel.
It allows integration with the W3 Total Cache plugin.

The company has 23 data centers across the world, and they are looking to expand it in the near future. In case you still doubt its benefits, you can go for a 14-day free trial to see what CDN77 has to offer. It offers $49 per month for its basic plan, and the range goes up from there.

Conclusion

There was a time when websites used to rely on a single server to access their data, and if due to some reason that server went down, the website would no longer be available. But with the advent of CDN, this type of catastrophe now, thankfully, only resides in history.

With the use of a reliable CDN, a website owner can ensure that visitors are having the fastest load time and the content is accessible throughout the globe with the optimal speed with no errors and with complete safety.

If we have to choose the option of the best CDN service, we would definitely go with Cloudflare CDN services, and the second-best option is likely MaxCDN. But you must go through the benefits by yourself and see which one suits your requirements the best.

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