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I am sure you already know the importance of website’s load time in SEO. Google has officially made it a ranking factor. So, you should always try to keep your website as fast as possible. I have already wrote how to speed up WordPress in a long explanatory article. You should not miss that. You can also use a good caching plugin to further boost your website’s load time.
Website’s load time or speed depends on lots of factors. So, you should consider all those. But the most important factor is the images load time. Images and other static resources take most of the load time. So, it is really important to keep your website’s static resource as fast as possible. If you use a CDN service, you can improve the load time a lot.
What is a CDN – Content Delivery Network?
CDN or Content Delivery Network are the servers that keep copies of your website’s static content. These servers are located across the globe and all these servers keep a copy of static resources. When a user loads your website, the static content is served from the nearest CDN server. So, it is already faster than loading the static content from your web host.
A good CDN server is always costly, so most of the people avoid using this. But there are few services that offer free CDN servers and help you in improving your website’s load time. In this article, I will talk about the best Free CDN services for WordPress. If you are a WordPress user, you should start using any of these.
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Best Free CDN services for WordPress
Here is the list of 5 best free CDN services for WordPress. You can use any of these to boost your website’s speed and improve your website’s experience.
1. CloudFlare
CloudFlare is the one I have been personally using for over 6 years. It offers free CDN service along with security features in free plan. It has over 100 data centres to server the static resources of your website. It also offers protection from basic DDOS attack. It is easy to setup and use. There is also a WordPress plugin that is being used by over 100,000 websites.
Also see: How to install CloudFlare flexible SSL in WordPress
CloudFlare keeps cache of your website’s images, CSS, JS and other static resources and servers from nearest CDN servers to give your website a boost. It is 100% free and there is no limit of bandwidth as well.
2. Incapsula
Incapsula is also similar to CloudFlare and offers free CDN service. It has a global network of CDN servers that uses intelligent caching and cache control options to give your website a boost. It claims to make your website 50% faster and save up to 70% bandwidth of your server.
Not just caching, it also offers basic security options and protection against DOS attack. It has a Web application Firewall to keep your website safe from known threats. In the free plan, you only get basic features. If you want more, you can always upgrade to pain plan.
3. Swarmify
Swarmify, Swarmify known as Swarm CDN, is also a free CDN service dedicated to WordPress. It offers a WordPress plugin to make implementation easy. It only works with images, but that is also a big help as images consumes most of the bandwidth and contribute in page size. It servers your images with “hyperlocal geo-serving” to make it faster.
It has a data transfer limit and offers only 10GB of free image transfer per month. So, it is good only if your website is small. If you surpass the limit, they charge $0.05 per GB and this is also not much.
10GB limit is 100% free and most of the WordPress users will fall in this category.
4. Jetpack Image CDN
Jetpack also offers a basic free CDN for images. If you do not know, there is a Jetpack’s Photon module that allows you to take advantage of the WordPress CDN to serve up your images from distributed servers of WordPress.
All you need is to install and activate the Jetpack plugin. The go to settings and activate the Photon module. It is not full scale CDN but a service to give your images a boost. All your images will be offloaded to the WordPress grid.
5. Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is not free for forever but you can get it free for a year to boost your website. It uses Amazon’s servers to boost your content’s speed. It is little more complicated that other CDN services added in the list. So, you may find it big hard to implement. You can use WP Offload S3 Lite WordPress plugin to integrate with your WordPress installation. This plugin takes care of complexities.
After the full year free CDN, it costs about $.10 per GB to keep using CloudFront.
Final Words
These are few CDN services you can use to boost the load time of your WordPress website. I personally use Cloudflare and I am satisfied with its CDN and security offering. If you use Jetpak, you should not miss its Photon module to take advantage of its free image CDN.
CloudFlare and Incapsula both offers security features along with CDN. SO, I always recommend these. These are very easy to setup. If you own a big website that requires better service, you can always go with MaxCDN. That is the best CDN service to try.
Now it is up to you. Decide what is suitable for your blog. If you want to recommend any other free CDN that is worth to add in this list, you can always recommend.
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