Page load time and content delivery speed are the two most critical aspects for any business today.
Why?
Because all webmasters want their users to have a unique, fulfilling experience with super-fast service. Here’s where a WordPress CDN comes into play.
What is CDN?
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It is the network of servers spread globally to serve the cached static (sometimes dynamic) content copies to your users worldwide.
Want to know more about a WordPress CDN?
- It is specially designed to fetch and serve data such as images, CSS, JavaScript, and video streams etc.
- It has different servers called POPs (Points of Presence) located at the different locations of the globe.
- These POPs host and deliver data from the nearest CDN to the users searching from a nearby location.
- A CDN depends on the nearest geographic location to deliver the content. Thus, it speeds up the data delivery process up to many times.
How Does a CDN Work?
First thing first, when you host your WordPress site on a server you need to choose a physical server location as your primary preferable location. Let’s assume you choose the US as your primary server location. But you have readers from all parts of the world.
Now, if you don’t have a WordPress CDN, your customers in the US will face no issues when opening your site but the readers sitting at a farther place, say, Asia, will have hard times while accessing your website.
Why?
Because the data has to travel a longer distance to reach those people searching from farther locations.
CDN resolves this problem by fetching the cached static data from the nearest server and speeding up the content delivery process. It generally utilizes different networking hops. These hops help serve data requests from web browsers to hosting servers and vice-versa.
Also, your WordPress CDN also helps decrease Latency. It loads your website’s data from the POPs closer to your customers.
9 Reasons You Must Use a WordPress CDN
- Speed & Uptime Boost
- Fast Delivery with Caching
- Global Reach
- Cost Effective
- Cut Bandwidth Cost
- Crash Resistance
- GZip Compression
- Enhanced Security
- SEO Benefits
#1 Speed and Uptime Boost
A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
Source – Neilpatel
Now, do you understand the importance of even 1-sec?
Speed is paramount for online success. You can’t afford to lag behind your competitors even because of that 1-sec delay. You have to make your site blazing fast and a WordPress CDN lets you do that.
As soon as you subscribe to a reliable CDN, here’s what you get:
- Your site gets a tremendous boost in its speed of request and uptime.
- Higher speed and uptime lead to more conversions and traffic.
- This helps decrease bounce back rate while increasing the dwell time.
To sum up:
Faster speed and response time result in more conversions, and better Google rankings. You need to have WordPress CDN, today!
#2 Fast Delivery with Caching
Okay, you got that a CDN increases your WordPress site speed drastically, but how it does it like magic?
‘Caching’ is clandestine!
Just like you use the top caching plugins to cache your site data for a better performance, a CDN for WordPress does the same. It uses caching to save the copy of your content and site assets on different POP locations spread across the globe.
When a user in any part of the world visits your site once or twice the CDN caches your site data automatically.
How it does that?
A WordPress CDN places an HTTP header known as “X-Cache” on the requests that it receives. As soon as the viewer visits your site twice or more, it caches your WordPress site media and it will show up as a HIT in the X-Cache. “HIT” means that now your data is cached on your CDN.
2.1 WordPress CDN Plugins
To add CDN to WordPress you can use WordPress CDN plugins such as CDN Enabler, or WP Rocket.
These plugins help in linking up your assets (caching your site) to the Content Delivery Network. It is done automatically; you don’t have to do a thing to get your content on the CDN.
#3 Global Reach
The internet usage has elevated exponentially over the last 10 years. A CDN lets you accelerate your global growth with its local POPs in every nook and cranny of the planet.
When you have the best CDN for WordPress by your side, you expand without any worries.
You have endless opportunities your way, and with WordPress CDN, global success is easier to achieve.
#4 Cost Effective
A CDN helps you save a lot of money. Don’t believe me?
Here it is:
When you want to establish your brand globally, would you take up different hostings in different places around the world?
Would that be a great idea?
Definitely no. It will cost you a heck lot of money and still won’t give you overwhelming results!
On the other hand, a good CDN would cut down that extra cost and would improve your site speed and performance up to many times.
In long run, you will find that you have been able to save oodles of money with the help of a good WordPress CDN. It’s a great choice to go with Managed hosting. Most of the providers like Breeze have CDN included for free.
#5 Cut Bandwidth Cost
The WordPress CDN allows bandwidth furcation across multiple servers on the globe. This, thereby, keeps one server from handling all the traffic, thus, reduces bandwidth consumption. It helps you save a lot of money on your bandwidth.
For instance, when you choose Cloudflare CDN, your bandwidth costs are always the lowest, regardless of the traffic spikes.
P.S. A good CDN always cuts down your bandwidth cost.
#6 Crash Resistance
A good CDN takes the load off your server and makes it lighter and faster. It, thus, reduces the chances of the site crashing up to several times.
How does it happen? A CDN reduces the server load on interconnections, peers, or backbones by its strategic placement.
In this way, a WordPress CDN frees up the capacity, decreases delivery costs, and takes loads off your server.
#7 GZip Compression
GZip compression helps increase the performance of the site. It benefits your website health by compressing the heavy files on your site, for faster network transfer.
It allows for a considerable reduction in the HTML, JS files, and stylesheets size.
Too much work, right?
But when you use a WordPress CDN, you don’t have to do Gzip compression on your own. A CDN utilizes GZip and automatically compresses the files making your site faster and better.
However, GZip doesn’t work on the images on your site. To make your site even faster with image compression, you must use the best image compression plugins.
#8 Enhanced Security
With increased internet usage, security threats and hackers’ attacks also upsurged. These hackers and bots are constantly seeking your site vulnerabilities. Thus, you can’t afford to leave a loophole in your WordPress and open doors for these bots to break in.
A CDN gives you a sigh of relief:
- A WordPress CDN offers an additional cybersecurity by providing a WAF (Web Application Firewall) for your site.
- Most CDNs automatically block the bad bots by identifying them instantly thereby make your site safer and stronger.
- A CDN can also help alleviate the DDoS attacks, spams, and malware on your website.
This makes CDN a must-have for all WordPress users across the web.
#9 SEO Benefits
WordPress + CDN = SEO Boost
Site speed has been proven to be a ranking factor in Google time and time again. Also, uptime, lower latency, and reduced request time are also active SEO factors.
If you’re fed up watching your rankings dinged, it’s time to use a WordPress CDN. Though it won’t make you rank on top instantly, you’ll surely get a slight SEO boost with all the benefits that it offers. You can read these best SEO tips to rank better instantly!
5 Best WordPress CDN Providers
These are our top five CDN providers for WordPress. You can choose any one of them. The result remains the same if you choose a free CDN for WordPress or a paid one.
Therefore, the decision to go to a hosting that includes free CDN never goes wrong.
Once you’ve chosen a reliable CDN provider, and moved to it successfully, it’s time to do some testing!
CDN Speed Test
We’ve had enough of talking about why to use a WordPress CDN and how it benefits your business online. Now, once you’ve started using a CDN, you can do the CDN speed test and simply notice the difference in the performance of your WordPress site before and after using a CDN.
One great way to get the CDN speed test done is through Pingdom. Make sure to run it more than twice when you do speed testing so that the media is properly cached.
You’ll definitely see a huge difference in your website performance.
Summing Up
A good WordPress CDN leads to blazing site speed, better Google rankings, low latency, and better user experience. Get one for your WordPress site today!
P.S. Content Delivery Network and a good web host go hand in hand. There are some hosts that also offer best-in-class CDN service for FREE to their clients. Breeze is one of those managed WordPress hosting platforms.
Don’t believe us? Here’s a 3-month trial. Take a free trial to see the difference for yourself.
