The host and theme you use to power your site play huge roles in its speed and overall performance. There are a number of different things you can do to improve upon this even further, but none are quite as effective as integrating your site into a content delivery network (CDN).
A CDN offers a way for you to balance the traffic your site receives across data centers located around the world. Not only does this improve performance, it makes your site more secure and protects against widespread DDoS attacks.
In this post, we list some of the best CDN providers available for the WordPress content management system.
Table of Contents
5 Best WordPress CDN Providers
1. BunnyCDN
BunnyCDN is based out of Slovenia and was founded in 2015 by a dedicated team of experts in the web development industry. It’s become a powerful solution that doesn’t forego performance despite its lower price.
Key Features
- 39 Data Centers - Deliver content to visitors in six continents with BunnyCDN’s network of 39 data centers.
- Free SSL Certificate - BunnyCDN offers free SSL certificates through its partnership with Let’s Encrypt. You can also bring your own certificate.
- Security - A vast network of data centers offers an effective way to minimize DDoS attacks, but you can also blacklist malicious IP addresses and block users from countries that send illegitimate traffic.
- Performance - The service uses Brotli and Gzip compression, HTTP/2 protocol, instant cache purging, image optimization, and intelligent routing to improve the speed and overall performance of your site.
- Cloud Storage - Store your data on fast cloud servers that have the ability to scale and acquire more resources when traffic surges occur.
- Video Delivery - The server infrastructure this network is built on is fully capable of delivering smooth playback for videos hosted on your own site. This allows you to avoid using third-party video hosting platforms. Live streaming is not supported.
Pricing
You’ll pay as low as $0.0025/GB and as high as $0.06/GB depending on where in the world the traffic you receive comes from and how much bandwidth you use. All customers are required to pay a $1/month minimum.
BunnyCDN offers two types of pricing structures to choose from. One, Standard, is based on region while the other, Volume, is based on bandwidth. You have access to the service’s entire network of data centers when you choose Standard pricing. Volume pricing, while cheaper, only gives you access to eight.
Finally, you can specify a bandwidth limit to protect yourself from overages.
A free, 14-day trial is available.
Also, if you want to learn more about it, check out our detailed BunnyCDN review!
2. KeyCDN
KeyCDN is a European CDN service based out of Switzerland. It’s a developer-friendly service that offers numerous features and an infrastructure suitable for open-source projects.
Key Features
- 34 Data Centers - Serve your content at blazingly fast speeds to customers in 25 countries in six continents. More data center locations added every year.
- SSL Certificate - Use KeyCDN’s free, built-in SSL certificate offered through Let’s Encrypt, or set up a custom certificate of your own.
- Security - Keep your server and traffic clean by blocking bots sent from malicious sources.
- Performance - Enhance the performance of your site with Brotli and Gzip compression, instant cache purging, and image processing.
- Storage - Store content and other large files on KeyCDN’s edge servers, which are based in Europe. The service recommends this for users who need to serve video content, especially HD and 4K videos, applications and video games.
- Reports - Learn more about the traffic your site receives and the data it processes with KeyCDN’s detailed analytics that report things like cache status and which file types and sizes are processed most frequently.
Pricing
KeyCDN’s pricing is based on a combination of region and volume. There are different rates for different regions, and your rate will decrease every month as the amount of bandwidth you use increases.
Prices range from $0.01/GB to as high as $0.14/GB, and the minimum rate you can pay is $4/month.
You can get started with a free, 14-day trial.
3. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is one of the largest and most popular CDN services available in the web development industry. It’s partnered with a number of different hosts, and it integrates with number of different CMS’s and applications.
Key Features
- 200 Data Centers - Connect your site to a massive network that spans 200 locations in over 90 countries around the world.
- SSL Certificate - Cloudflare offers its own SSL certificate in its free tier.
- DNS - Connect your domain to the service’s DNS servers, which support CNAME records, custom nameservers, uptime guarantees and more.
- Security - Cloudflare manages the traffic your site receives with a web-application firewall, bot deterrence through behavioral analysis and machine learning across the 20 million internet properties it supports, and a tool it calls Argo Tunnel that locks down origin server ports and protocols when heavy threats occur.
- Performance - Cloudflare’s network is among the fastest in the world thanks to its large collection of data centers, caching tools and protocols, support for HTTP/3, and more.
- Reports - Review the traffic and data your site receives and transfers with a built-in analytics tool.
- Video Streaming - Store and distribute high-quality video content with Cloudflare’s video hosting service.
Pricing
Cloudflare is a free CDN service that offers SSL certificates and DDoS protection in its free tier. Paid plans start at a flat fee of $20/month. This plan includes Cloudflare’s WAF, quicker response times from support and more.
4. StackPath
StackPath is a CDN service founded in 2015 that grew exceptionally well in its first few years. It acquired MaxCDN in 2016 and has fully integrated the service into its own network. Other properties it’s acquired include Server Density, Fireblade and Encrypt.me (formerly Cloak).
Key Features
- 45 Data Centers - The network has 45 edge locations in several countries across five continents.
- SSL Certificate - All sites connected to StackPath’s CDN and WAF services are protected by its EdgeSSL certificate by default. You can also use its private SSL certificate or third-party certificates.
- DNS - Managed DNS infrastructure designed for larger sites and applications. It offers more effective DDoS protection, uptime performance and security.
- Security - Protect your site from DDoS attacks, bad bots and malware with the company’s CDN and affordable WAF services.
- Performance - StackPath’s data centers use edge servers, intelligent caching with instant purging and Gzip compression.
- Analytics - Use real-time analytics and custom reports to monitor your traffic, bandwidth usage, requests and more.
Pricing
StackPath’s CDN service is available at a flat rate of $10/month. This price gives you access to 1TB worth of bandwidth, StackPath’s entire network of data centers, a free SSL certificate, unlimited requests and service for an unlimited number of sites.
You can combine StackPath’s WAF and DNS services with its CDN for as little as $20/month. A one-month free trial is available for all plans.
5. Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is Amazon’s own CDN service. It’s part of its Amazon Web Services suite of cloud computing tools and is used by some of the biggest brands in the world, including Hulu, Slack, PBS, King and Discovery.
Key Features
- 216 Data Centers - AWS has one of the largest networks with over 216 “points of presence” in 84 cities around the world.
- Custom SSL Certificate - AWS includes a service called Amazon Certificate Manager, which allows you to create a custom public SSL certificate for free. Custom private SSL certificates are available for extra fees per month. Third-party certificates can be used, but they’re not as easy to integrate with CloudFront.
- Security - AWS uses AWS Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall and AWS Route 53 to provide advanced DDoS protection, bot deterrence and safeguards against malware.
- Performance - AWS’ infrastructure is designed to improve the performance of static and dynamic content alike with its network’s sheer size, caching protocols and network-layer optimizations for latency and throughput. It’s one of the most advanced infrastructures in the world and powers such video streaming applications as Amazon Prime Video and Hulu.
- Cloud Storage - Your use of AWS gives you access to Amazon S3, Amazon’s cloud storage solution.
Pricing
Amazon CloudFront has a pay-per-use pricing model that’s fairly complex. You’ll receive your first 50GB of data transfers and 2 million HTTP requests per month for free for a year as part of Amazon Web Service’s free tier.
After that, pricing is based on data transfers, HTTP requests, invalidation requests and field level encryption requests. Prices start at $0.01/HTTPS request and go as high as $0.17/GB of bandwidth transferred to India.
There are dozens of rates for different parts of the service between those numbers.
Final Thoughts
Choosing a CDN mainly comes down to deciding what your budget can afford and the performance your site needs. Users with simple sites and performance needs should consider using networks their hosts are partnered with.
Kinsta offers one of the most user-friendly CDN solutions in this regard. Their CDN service is powered by KeyCDN, making it more than just a simple partnership. Because the service is fully integrated into Kinsta’s hosting infrastructure, you can enable it with the click of a button.
Check out our guide featuring seven tips on speeding up a WordPress site for more help on improving your site’s performance.
