Are you searching for a free CDN for WordPress? Do you want to increase your site’s loading speed? If the answer is yes, then you’re at the right place.
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It helps to boost your WordPress website’s performance by loading your content faster on your visitor’s side. It adds extra servers for your site and provides the content to users from a server nearest to them. Hence, the site loads faster.
CDNs are greatly useful but, they’re mostly paid services. Another way, some quality web hosting services include it in their package. But if you’re on a tight budget, then getting a CDN looks like a burden.
But don’t worry. Luckily, there are some CDN services available free for WordPress sites. And, we’ve listed out the best of those free WordPress CDN services here. Let’s check them out!
What is a CDN & Why Do You Need it on WordPress?
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a geographically distributed network of multiple servers spread across the world. Those servers on different locations work together to provide faster delivery of content.
CDN caches all your website’s static content (images, javascript files, and stylesheets) and stores them on its servers. Whenever a request comes, CDN provides it from the nearest server of the user’s location.
Overall it aims to load the website as quickly as possible. It reduces the distance by distributing the content from the nearest server. So, when the data gets delivered from the nearest location, it’s automatically going to take less time to load.
It not only makes your site faster but also gives you numerous benefits apart from that. Some more benefits of CDN are:
- Increases Website Ranking: Were you aware of the fact that search engines love fast-loading sites? Yes, and equally as much as your visitors do. So, with a CDN, your site might get better SEO rankings than before.
- Improved Website Security: Plus, CDN is effective in protecting from DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks. Using a CDN can minimize the constantly increasing security threats to some extent and make your site more secure.
With that, you’ve got a fair bit of idea regarding CDN and its usefulness. Now, let’s check out the best free CDNs for WordPress sites.
7 Best Free WordPress CDN Services 2021
1. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is one of the most popular and best CDN for WordPress sites. It’s a global network that’s widespread all over the world and provides you with content at a rapid speed. It offers plenty of features so that you can secure your websites, APIs, and Internet applications.
It offers DDoS protection, shared SSL, and has up to a CDN network of 180 servers. Also, it protects your internal resources such as behind-the-firewall applications.
You can get started with Cloudflare in WordPress easily with the help of the Cloudflare plugin. It’s available free on WordPress.org.
Features:
- Integrated security and performance
- Ease of use
- A global cloud network that spans over 100 countries
- Intelligent routing
- Image and video optimization
Pricing:
- Free – Easy to use DNS, free SSL, DDoS protection
- Pro – $20/ month, Web Application Firewall (WAF), Bot report & mitigation
- Business – $200/ month, everything in Pro, priority support
- Enterprise – Ask for a quote
2. Shift8 CDN
Shift8 CDN is another free CDN service for static assets on your site (CSS, JS, Images, and more). It will make your site load faster by using latency-based and geographic-based DNS (Domain Name Server) resolution.
Shift8 CDN has endpoints all over the world and is super easy to use. You need to simply install its free WordPress plugin, and register with the CDN service. And you’re ready to go.
Features:
- Geographic and latency based DNS routing
- Super easy setup
- Endpoints all over the world
- Excellent Support
- Good rating
Pricing:
- Free – Basic Global Endpoint Distribution, up to 1TB bandwidth/ month
- Pro – $5/ month, Premium Global Endpoint Distribution, up to 5TB bandwidth/ month
- Agency – $20/ month, Premium Global Endpoint Distribution, up to 25TB bandwidth/ month
3. Jetpack
If you’re familiar with WordPress, then you might have discovered Jetpack. It’s a popular WordPress plugin that offers you so many options. And one of them is for making WordPress sites faster and safer.
It provides auto-real time backups, easy restores, malware scanning, and spam protection. Jetpacks free CDN auto optimizes your images and speeds up your site to reduce bandwidth and save money. Also, it works well with WP Super Cache and Cloudflare.
Features:
- Backup your site in real-time automatically and restore to any point with a click
- One-Click fix to restore your site for malware
- Anti-spam features that block spam comments and form responses
- Lazy load images for super-fast experience on all devices
- Brute force attack protection that protects login pages from attacks
Pricing:
- Free – Site stats, Content Delivery Network, Downtime monitoring, etc.
- Backup Daily – $4.77/ month (when paid yearly), automated daily backups, One-click restores
- Security Daily – $11.97/ month (when paid yearly), daily scan, comment & form spam protection
- Complete – $47.97/ month (when paid yearly), CRM, Site Search
4. Optimole
Next on the list, we’ve Image optimization and Lazy Load by Optimole. As the name suggests, it’s an ideal plugin for all of your image optimization needs. In fact, it’s an image optimizer plugin, but we included it in this list because it includes a free image CDN service for WordPress.
Its full automation and a range of evolutionary features remove your bloaty pages and weighty images. Optimole serves all your site’s images, CSS, and JS via Amazon CloudFront for free. Start improving your site’s performance in minutes with this plugin.
Features:
- Supports all image types
- Supports both Retina and WebP images
- Cloud image library support
- Serves images from a global CDN for free
- Optimizes based on the visitor’s actual device
Pricing:
- Free
- Starter – $19.08/ month when billed yearly, smart lazy loading, Cloudfront CDN
- Business – $39.08/ month when billed yearly, unmetered bandwidth, 24/7 support
- Find out more by clicking the button below.
5. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is one of the best WordPress cache plugins, which helps to improve the site performance by integrating CDN. Just like other previous plugins and services, it also ensures a better SEO by minimizing the website’s load time.
You can’t optimize the website better than this as it’s the most loved one on WordPress. It combines with your media library, enabling it to load from the nearby global servers. Go to your website dashboard, install the plugin, and make your website fast.
Features:
- Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private/dedicated servers, and dedicated servers/clusters
- Mobile support
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support
- Reverse proxy integration via Nginx or Varnish
Pricing:
- Free
- $99/ year for an Annual subscription to the premium version
6. SmartVideo
Additionally, we’ve SmartVideo in this list. It’s the best video player and CDN plugin for WordPress. If you’re looking for ways to get fast-optimized videos on your site, then it’s perfect for you. It offers a video player insertion by which you can have full control over your videos.
With it, you’ll have clean, accelerated, and professional playback that’s super-fast, so your site isn’t going to lag again. SmartVideo lets you create videos that are high in quality as well as speed. Adding videos on your site is hectic until you discover and install this plugin!
Features:
- With the help of it, you can add a video to your site in seconds
- Optimized to ensure faster page-loading than typical embeds
- It’s 12 times faster than YouTube
- Buffer-free playback
- Global Delivery Network
Pricing:
- Free
- Small Business – $29/ month
- Video Pro – $59/ month
- Find out more by clicking the button below.
7. Cloudinary
Lastly, in our list, we’ve Cloudinary. It’s a free image and video optimization CDN for WordPress. And, it provides image optimization, video transcoding, and manipulation with the global CDNs.
With this plugin, you can improve your WordPress site’s performance with faster page load times, advanced auto-responsive delivery, and a better visual experience. For you to get started first, you need to register for a Cloudinary account. And after that, you can install, activate and configure this plugin to make use of the service.
Features:
- Automatic delivers responsive images for delivery on all the screen sizes
- Search and browsing media with AI-powered tagging and all the attributes within the media library
- Automatically optimize and apply a specified global transformation to pre-existing media
- Display images and videos via a customizable interactive media gallery
- The most comprehensive array of image and video manipulation capabilities, powered by AI
Pricing:
- Free
- Plus – $99/month
- Find out more by clicking the button below.
8. Amazon CloudFront (Free Trial) – Bonus CDN
Amazon CloudFront is a CDN service that provides advanced security capabilities, including field-level encryption and HTTPS Support. It’s not entirely a free service but you can get 12 months/50 GB of free usage with it.
It has over 200 servers globally by which you can get your content as quickly as possible. Plus, it caches images, videos, APIs, and stylesheets so that your website will be super fast. Also, it delivers data, videos, and applications securely.
Features:
- Global scaled network for fast content delivery
- Highly secure
- Highly Programmable and Secure Edge Computing
- DDoS protection
- Deep Integration with AWS
Plus, it comes in different offers on the AWS Free Tier:
- 12 months free: For 12-months following your initial sign-up date to AWS.
- Trials: Short-term free trial offers start from the date you activate a particular service.
Conclusion
With that, we’ve come to an end! In this article, we’ve tried our best to shortlist some of the best free CDN services for a WordPress site. We hope you liked it!
With the help of these free CDN, you can skyrocket your traffic to the site. Plus, maintain better security. The first and foremost rule of a website is to run your site poorly. Don’t let your visitors bounce off easily. Indeed use a CDN for that.
Among the free options, Cloudflare is the best and reliable option to handle all of your static files including, spreadsheet and JS files. You can set up CDN with Cloudflare free now. Once your site grows, you can switch to its paid version. Or choose other paid services.
Also, check our article on best WordPress cache plugins.
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Still, you’ve any questions regarding the CDN Services? Then leave a comment below.
