Loading...If you have only started your blog, most probably, you have a tight budget but huge ambitions. It’s important to maintain good user experience, which is why loading speed should be constantly high. Most people are not patient, when it comes to website loading, and if it takes more than three seconds for a page to load, they are most likely to abandon it.
You might have already optimized everything on the blog starting from images and scripts and finishing by Gzip compression. But if you still don’t use best CDN for your website, it is not totally optimized. With a CDN (content delivery network), the speed of your WordPress blog can become much, much higher, so you will be able to serve content to end-users quickly and they won’t leave your site.
What is a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?
CDN is a network of numerous servers located in different countries, regions or continents. These edge servers cache static content of website including images, JavaScript, and CSS. When an end-user visits a website, he or she will have the content delivered to web-browser through the nearest server, which boosts loading time.
Why deploying a CDN?
As you can see, when that data is delivered from a distance, it will surely take more time to load. But, when the same thing is done through a server that is close to them, the site will be loaded very fast. Besides, CDN has many advantages for SEO and helps to prevent security issues.
Now when you know that CDN is a must for your WordPress blog, you need to find the one that will suit your project. If your startup needs money for development, you can save on CDN – there are many free services around. Read about seven worthy variants that can help your business.
1. CloudFlare
CloudFlare has data centers around the world, and all servers are absolutely free to use. It’s failry easy to implement such a network:
- create a free account;
- add your blog URL;
- CloudFlare will provide you with custom nameservers;
- specify your domains to the nameservers.
Now you’re done!
CloudFlare network may save about 60% bandwidth and reduce the number of requests by 65%.
2. Photon by Jetpack
Many WordPress bloggers implement Jetpack plugin as it makes blog user-friendly. This service is not exactly a CDN, but would perform its functions and be particularly useful, if you use a lot of images. Photon CDN will serve your images via WordPress.com servers. This plugins is activated simply via site dashboard.
3. SwarmCDN
Although this is a new service with a free plan including 250 Gb only, it is worth trying, because it is available in more than 190 countries worldwide, and provides pretty good performance. High reliability is a rare case with free CDNs, but SwarmCDN is a pleasant exception.
4. jsDelivr
Have a lot of JavaScript files in your blog? Try jsDelivr: this network will support fast script delivery, especially if you use custom JavaScript on your website and host it there. If this is your case, we also advise to install WordPress plugin in your blog.
5. Coral CDN
Coral CDN is a P2P (peer-to-peer) based CDN with millions of computers connected to this network over the world. CoralCDN serves static content through servers by appending ‘nyud.net’ to the URL.’
6. Incapsula
Incapsula enables content delivery from the cloud and features DDoS protection, load balancing and failover, website security and some other tools. It takes just five minutes to have the service activated and WordPress to get correct IP address information. Just like CloudFlare, Incapsula can route website traffic via globally distributed network of end servers (this is done with the help of minor DNS change). It also tracks incoming traffic and blocks threats.
7. Google App Engine
In fact, App Engine is Google’s answer to Amazon S3 + EC2. This variant can be used for running web applications, website hosting and data storage. Free plan includes 500 Mb of storage, 10 hosted projects and 5.000.000 page views limit per month. However, setting up requires some technical knowledge of Python and some web based applications.
Alternatively, you can use some non-expensive paid options, like SpaceCDN’s networks. With pricing plans starting from as low as $10 a month, it’s not hard to find a network that won’t hurt your budget.
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