5 Free CDN for Your WordPress Blog

Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help you to improve your blog performance such as faster page load and better contents delivery, especially for blogs with massive visitors traffic. Here are some CDN which you can use for free for your wordpress blog.

CDN is a network of servers around the globe and working to deliver content to users who access your website – so users will access CDN’s network servers, not from origin hosting server. Users will access the server that is geographically closest, so the content delivery will be highly optimized and efficient. CDN able to significantly reduce the hosting server load

CDN network servers are usually optimized using the selected internet backbones, in order to improve and maximize access speed between servers.

For further details about the CDN, please refer to the following video:

You can use CDN service providers such as MaxCDN, Akamai, cachefly, and others. But you have to spent extra cost to get their services.

There is a solution to get a free CDN services (or CDN-like services). Here is the list of some providers of free CDN services that you can use for your wordpress blogs:

#1. Cloudflare

Personally, I used a free account from Cloudflare. They have a rich features such as web optimization options, threats control, country based blocking, etc. And best of all, you can use their service for free, no-frills, hassle-free, and easy to setup. Their support staff are friendly and welcoming. They use state-of-the-art technology to provide best content delivery, and 99,999% uptime guarantee. Paid account is available too with extra features, such as live statistic reports, etc. Check out the reasons why I used Cloudflare.

#2. Incapsula

Incapsula is a internet company based in Singapore. Incapsula provide free CDN services to their users. After 30 days using free trial services of Incapsula, they will asked you to upgrade your account type – just ignore their notice, then automatically you will use their FREE service type permanently with some features limitation.

#3. Swarmify

Swarmify (formerly SwarmCDN) in their CDN plans offering 10GB of free images delivery. SwarmCDN is a unique content delivery provider. Swarmify claim they have they own technology to accelerate content delivery to web visitors.

#4. Netdepot CDN

Netdepot (formerly GNAX) is a well known web hosting company based on Houston, TX. Netdepot grow rapidly, and start to offers wide varieties of hosting service, including content delivery service. The good news is, Netdepot offer free for first 100GB contents delivery traffic and 5¢/GB after it. You can sign up here!

I do some test with Netdepot CDN, and the results is very good – all static web contents loaded in a blink of eyes!

#5. Photon

Photon is image delivery acceleration service (and editing) for sites hosted on WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected WordPress sites. It has many limitations, but seems very effective to boost images loading time.

To use Photon, simply install Jetpack plugin for WordPress, and you are ready to go!

Caching mechanism to improve WordPress sites performances

In some conditions, especially when your WordPress-based sites starts growing and generating bigger traffic, your web hosting may slowed down, because its should handle hundreds (or even thousands) requests per second.

CDN may help you to reduce the server loads by distributing contents delivery, but still cannot reduce server loads that is caused by dynamic contents processing (eg. server side scripting by PHP).

There is more advanced options for improving WordPress performance to cover this issue by using page/object caching mechanism.

Pantheon.io have a good article that explaining how caching mechanism using Redis or Varnish that can help you to gain better websites performances under high traffic.