When we talk about making our WordPress sites or blogs faster in terms of loading times, there are many factors that contribute into making your site render faster to the end users / readers / customers. One of the most important factors can be use of a CDN or Content Delivery Network that can take lots of load away from your server by providing some content from its own servers.
While most of CDN service providers have paid services, there are some that provide CDN services for free and a combination of these free CDN services can make your site or blog fly. If you are fine with a paid CDN provider you can go ahead and check names like MaxCDN or Amazon but if you ask us the free CDN services have worked really well for one of our site with more than million monthly views. So, here are some free CDN services that you can or must try.
CloudFlare:
It is perhaps one of the must have services for WordPress not only because of its huge network of CDN servers worldwide but also because it comes with a very reliable security service that also helps in making your site faster by decreasing bandwidth wastage by crawlers, bots, spiders. Installation is easy!!
Go to Cloudflare.com, sign up. Once done, let CloudFlare scan your domain or site name. Once it has scanned and displayed your DNS records, you can make CloudFlare active by choosing which Records you want to go through CloudFlare. You may need to change your Domain name-servers to CloudFlare provided servers. Read all the steps by clicking here.
You can also take help of your service providers, if you have any difficulty in installing CloudFlare. If you have hosting providers like BlueHost, you will have CloudFlare installed by default and you need to just activate the services from CPanel in one simple step.
You can also install the Cloudflare plugin on your Dashboard for better integration with Cloudflare.
Photon:
Photon is a CDN service form Automattic, the founder of WordPress and best part is that it is free and can be installed and activated very easily. You need to install JetPack Plugin and then activate Photon from settings and you are done. It works very well and we have it on all of our sites. Photon uploads and delivers your blog images from its own servers. It is a must have CDN services if you really want a free CDN to make your blog faster. It is very reliable too.
JQuery MaxCDN / CloudFlare:
Two WordPress Plugins by same author allow you to use JQuery Foundation CDN to deliver open source scripts jQuery, jQuery-migrate and Masonry from JSDeliver. The Plugin actually uses MaxCDN / CloudFlare’s (don’t confuse it with CloudFlare service described above) content network that these two have provided to JQuery foundation for free and is really effective in making your sites load faster. You can install these plugins from here and here.
Swarmify CDN:
Swarmify (earlier Swarm CDN) has a free plan and a nice WordPress plugin. It has many favorable reviews to suggest that it works fine too. You can install the plugin and see how it works for you. Setup is quite easy and well-explained on the Plugin’s pages.
As we said you can try a mix of these, but we do recommend using CloudFlare, Photon and JQuery MaxCDN / CloudFlare Plugins in combination.
Do let us know what you think about these free CDN options and whether you want us to cover any other free CDN provider here.