WordPress is an extensive CMS with limitless customization, with brilliant themes and plugins. And to engage with visitors, most of us use a lot of media contents such as images and videos. A free CDN for WordPress will come handy in such cases.

However, we often do not realize that with more and more contents and customizations, our website gets slower.

A Slow Website Is A Red Flag

Nowadays, a slow website is a big concern and should be dealt with properly. It is best practice to keep website loading speed below 3 secs.

(You can check your website loading speed using Pingdom.)

You should know that the Google algorithm detects slow sites and hence, your SEO rankings will be affected if you do not prioritize speeding up your site.

A slow site will lower visitors’ UX (User Experience) and will probably increase your bounce rate, i.e. more people might leave your site even before it may load properly.

Hence, one of the most important things to do when optimizing your WordPress site is to speed up the website loading speed as much as possible.

Now, there are several ways to speed up a WordPress site. However, one of the best ways is to use CDN.

What Is CDN?

Content Delivery Network, or as we call it, CDN, is a network of distributed servers. Any static data and resources of your website such as images, videos, CSS files, JavaScript files, etc. may be stored here. And when a person tries to visit your site, the CDN will deliver these data and resources through servers that are closest to that visitor’s location.

The main reason why you should consider using a CDN is that it will make sure the static resources on your site will load faster and will ensure lower HTTP requests.

This will definitely make your website faster, and reduce bounce rate; a big plus for SEO and UX.

Another reason is that you usually get a single server from your hosting provider. Too many visitors at a time will increase HTTP requests which may lead to a slower website, or even trigger a server crash (when there is a huge amount of traffic, all at once).

Now that you know the importance of using a CDN, let us look at 10 free CDN for WordPress sites that you can choose from to help you speed up your WordPress site.

Also check out our 15 must have conversion rate optimization tools

10 Best Free CDN for WordPress sites

Here is a list of 10 CDN providers that you should look into when choosing the right CDN for you.

1. CloudFlare

CloudFlare is currently the best free CDN for WordPress. It provides a combination of security and content delivery. It ensures that the static data and resources are protected and delivered super fast, whenever required.

CloudFlare estimates that they can increase website speed by reducing the bandwidth requirement by 60% and causing 65% less HTTP requests. Currently, over 2 million websites use CloudFlare CDN service.

Features of CloudFlare are:

• Has over 150 data centers globally
• Smart traffic routing to avoid congestion
• Can optimize site speed for visitors on IPv6 server even if your site server is set up for IPv4
• Offers security measures from spamming, DDoS attack and SQL injections
• Provide statistics reports on your website traffic
• Support for MPEG-DASH and HLS video files

Click here to visit the website of CloudFlare.

2. Incapsula

Incapsula is a reliable free CDN for WordPress. It is ideal to speed up your WordPress site by reducing bandwidth usage.

Incapsula claims to be able to speed up websites by 50% and will reduce bandwidth usage by 70%.

This CDN offers extensive caching control in four different ways – caching disabled, only static data to be cached, update data real time and cache static data, and cache all data on your site.

Features of Incapsula are:

• Intelligent caching control
• Feature to collect dynamic changes on your site real-time
• Implements file minification, automated compression, and session reuse to reduce bandwidth speed
• Maintains frequency analysis to keep track on commonly used resources for higher priority and fetched from RAM
• Automatically enables both IPv4 and IPv6 support for your website
• Supports HTTP/2 protocol
• Protection from DDoS

Click here to visit the website of Incapsula.

3. Swarmify

Swarmify is a useful, free CDN for WordPress that allows you to get CDN service for images and videos only. If you run a website that has too many images or videos, then this is the best choice.

The dedicated CDN service to videos cause buffer-free video loading to viewers, thus enhancing UX.

Features of Swarmify are:

• Offers embedding videos on your site using their own video player – SmartVideo
• Delivers buffer-free media content
• You can connect it with your Youtube channels and it will collect the videos for your site
• Unlimited bandwidth for video CDN service

Click here to visit the website of Swarmify.

4. Site Accelerator

This is and exclusive free CDN for WordPress made by JetPack. This CDN is focus on optimizing your images and offering CDN service through their global network servers.

You need to use this CDN through JetPack plugin, and it ensures the image load time is faster on your site.

Features of Site Accelerator are:

• As long as you have JetPack, you can simply enable Site Accelerator from your Dashboard without the need of other platforms
• Accelerate image loading time by optimizing them
• CDN service for all static files
• Easy user interface

Click here to visit the website of Site Accelerator.

5. Netlify

Netlify is an Application Delivery Network (ADN) which is an advanced form of CDN for faster site speed. Rather than focusing on just the static contents, it can store and deliver the entire site. It has an API which allow you to integrate it with your WordPress site.

You can set easy cache control to collect real time changes to your site. It can be used as an alternative to your production servers or staging servers.

Since it follows ADN mechanism, it can keep contents from dynamic sites and applications.

Features of Netlify are:

• It follows ADN service that covers up CDN activities
• Can store and deliver dynamic websites
• Will automatically mark your site and HTTPS
• You can perform A/B testing or upload the site to a staging server
• DNS management.

Click here to visit the website of Netlify.

6. CoralCDN

Coral CDN is a peer to peer CDN service for WordPress that’s completely free of cost. Rather than relying on global servers, it relies on active peering of your data that increases the load time of your static data and resources.

Features of Coral CDN are:

• Easy to mirror all your static resources of your website
• Peer-to-peer CDN technology making load time faster
• Reduces HTTP requests
• Implements a clustering algorithm that exploits distributed network measurements
• Ideal to be used on under-provisioned websites for maximum performance

Click here to visit the website of Coral CDN.

7. jsDelivr

jsDelivr is an open source, free CDN for WordPress that offers the fastest CDN service for all javascripts files on a site. Which means, it provides CDN service for plugins that use jQery, Javascript or any js-libraries.

All applications through npm, WordPress or GitHub can be loaded faster using jsDelivr.

Features of jsDelivr are:

• Completely free and open source
• Over 750 endpoints globally
• CDN service for all Javascript contents
• CDN service for all applications through npm, WordPress or GitHub

Click here to visit the website of jsDelivr.

8. Google Cloud CDN

This is another amazing open source and free CDN for WordPress that is ideal for sites that run under HTTPS (i.e. SSL certified). However, if your site contents are not SSL certified, you can have their URLs turned to HTTPs through this CDN tool.

It uses the extensive reach of Google to deliver static contents from your site to visitors real quick since they have data centers almost everywhere. Plus it helps to generate lower number of HTTP requests.

Also, you can integrate it with Google Cloud Platform and use the Platform Console and Stackdriver Logging for to get complete visual on your site.

Features of Google Cloud CDN are:

• Uses Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage as servers to deliver contents
• Works with sites with SSL certifications only
• Turn contents in HTTPs
• Over 90 caching data centers globally
• This CDN doesn’t require any local or regional DNS to work properly
• Supports HTTP/2 as well

This CDN service is not entirely free. It gives you a small trial period, afterwards, it costs very little. (Yuu will find the price distribution on their website).

Click here to visit the website of Google Cloud CDN.

9. AWS Cloud Front

This is a CDN service organized by Amazon that can be used for WordPress sites through API. This CDN service is fully integrated with AWS infrastructure.

It offers a free trial and afterwards, affordable pay-as-you-go cost.

Features of AWS Cloudfront are:

• Uses Points of Presence (PoP) system with over 156 PoPs
• Integrated with AWS shield to protect data from threats such as DDoS
• Easily use this CDN with your WordPress site through its API for WordPress
• Smart routing by analyzing the best possible network server near site visitor

Click here to visit the website of AWS Cloudfront.

10. MetaCDN

MetaCDN is a popular CDN for WordPress most people use. This CDN is really effective due to its extensive network of Amazon, EdgeCast and Fastly altogether, i.e. a huge number of data servers to easily deliver contents.

However, it is not completely free. You get a small trial run and afterwards, you have a monthly fee.

Features of MetaCDN are:

• Uses extensive server networks of Amazon, EdgeCast and Fastly for faster content deliver.
• Provide detailed reports on your website performance daily
• Best CDN amon all Freemius or Premium CDNs
• Ensures overload of traffic won’t cause your server to crash due to its smart routing system

Click here to visit the website of MetaCDN.

Tip:

Apart from using CDN providers, you can also consider using the common cloud storage systems such as Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc. as an alternative to CDN service. You can simply store your contents in cloud drives and generate URLs to use on your website. However, this is only when you have a little number of contents since these storage systems doesn’t have a separate security measure.

Conclusion

Website speed and content security are major factors in optimizing your website. Hence start using CDN services and get a better website performance.

If you have used any of these CDNs that I included on this list, please share us your experience on the comments below.