If you are running a website that has a lot of images and similar content, a Content Delivery Network might be useful for you as it can help in reducing page load times.
In this article, I shall be taking a look at various CDN options available for WordPress users and making some recommendations at the end. However, before going any further, let us first take a look at the advantages of using a CDN.
Advantages of Using a CDN
Basically, a Content Delivery Network helps in loading the static content of your website (images, videos, JavaScript, et al) in a fast and efficient manner. A CDN provider uses its multiple servers across the globe to serve such static content to visitors from various regions (simple logic: geographically closer means quicker pageviews).
Some of the major advantages of using a CDN are as follows:
Websites load quicker.
Saves a lot of bandwidth — ideal for heavy traffic websites or those with limited shared hosting accounts.
Less pressure on your hosting server.
With the introduction out of the way, let us now take a look at some of the major Content Delivery Networks.
1. Google Page Speed Services
One of the simplest and totally free service from Google to optimize and automatically speed up web pages. Once you sign up for PageSpeed service and provide with your serving and reference domains, you than send traffic to PageSpeed Service by pointing your DNS CNAME entry to ghs.google.com.
Thereafter, PageSpeed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.
2. Cloudflare
Apart from optimizing your blog’s speed, Cloudflare also offers features like threat control, country based blocking etc. The uptime is 99.99% and the serve is very easy to configure.
3. Photon by Jetpack
Photon is a WordPress-only image caching service. You will need the Jetpack plugin on your site in order to make use of Photon. The caching abilities of Photon are quite impressive, though it works only on images in posts and featured images (post thumbnails). So if all you need is a service that can speed up the load times for your blog’s images, Photon can, indeed, be useful.
4. Coral Content Distribution Network (Coral CDN)
CoralCDN is a free and open content delivery or distribution network. It works on peer-to-peer technologies, composed of world-wide network of nameservers and web proxies. If you want to use CoralCDN to publish content, then just append the URL with “.nyud.net” or you can simply open a website using CoralCDN by just adding .nyud.net to the hostname.
5. CoBlitz
CoBlitz provides a means to scale large files of a server over an HTTP content distribution network. It requires no modification of the clients or servers, since all the necessary support is located on the content distribution network. To run URL through CoBlitz content distribution network all you have to do is add “http://coblitz.codeen.org/” to the URL which you want to serve.
6. Incapsula
Incapsula offers state-of-the-art performance and security to websites of all sizes. Just a simple DNS change, your website’s traffic is routed through incapsula’s globally distributed network of high-powered servers. It even protects you from threats like multi-Gigabit DDos attacks (Not available for free). It only takes about five minutes to add your website to Incapsula by making changes to your DNS (Domain Name Server).
7. jsDelivr
jsDelivr is a free hosting or content distribution or delivery network (CDN) which lets users to host javascripts for free. By loading javascripts from a CDN like jsDelivr which has 13 edge locations, you can drastically speed up your websites. jsDelivr supports hosting javascripts for WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal CMS based websites.
Closing Words: Using CDN for a website with lot of traffic will definitely help you in decreasing load time and increasing visitors. But before paying a good amount of money to big CDN services, you should first give a try to free CDN networks, just to find out if it is really helping you and your visitor or not.
8. DropBox as CDN
Dropbox, a well-known cloud based file sharing/storage network can also be used as cloud based CDN for WordPress based websites upto 2GB space as free service via a plugin. The plugin for WordPress available at Dropbox CDN Plugin page, which helps in reducing the bandwidth of your server and allowing users to load your site faster. The plugin allows you to upload your images, stylesheets, scripts into your Dropbox public folder and serve these files from the Dropbox network.
9. Easy imgur.com Post Images
This WordPress plugin lets you host your images only, on imgur.com. One can add an image via the WordPress post media manager, and it will upload the image to the popular image host imgur.com and let you insert the image into your post with a thumbnail or without. It does not allow you host any thing other than just images.
Related:
3 Free Methods to setup CDN Service for Your Websites
14 CDN Providers to Make WordPress Blazing Fast