Best CDN for WordPress: 5 Content Delivery Networks Compared

So long story short, CDNs are awesome. They make the connection faster, and thus improve the user experience overall. But there’s the question, should you go with StackPath, CloudFlare, Amazon CloudFront, Akamai Edge, or Fastly?

Round 1: Server locations

Let’s start the StackPath vs CloudFlare vs Amazon CloudFront vs Akamai Edge vs Fastly comparison with probably the most important parameter of any CDN – server locations and the size of the topography overall.

You’re always going to have the best results if you sign up to a network that has the best coverage in the geographical area where your audience is.

For instance, what’s the point of signing up to a service with the most server locations in the US if you run an Australian-based WooCommerce store?

Therefore, here are the server locations of each network we’re comparing, according to their own information  (interactive map; feel free to switch between different CDNs from the sidebar of the map) :

(💡 Note: You’ll notice that there’s no Akamai Edge servers on the map. That’s because Akamai has the biggest CDN infrastructure of them all with more than 350,000 servers in over 134 countries. In a word, it’s everywhere.)

Round 2: Price vs features and their limitations

Generally speaking, the price tag you’ll have to pay for a good CDN service depends on how much of your website data you want to hook up to the CDN + the bandwidth this will require on a monthly basis.

Here’s what you get with each network:

* CloudFlare doesn’t bill based on bandwidth; the 3 main plans available (including the free one) all have different parameters based on different traits other than bandwidth.

** Akamai doesn’t showcase their pricing publicly; you need to contact the company to get a quote; that being said, they’re more on the expensive side, with price tags going even as high as $3,500 for 10 TB.

Then, there are other standard features that you should expect from a WordPress-friendly CDN:

Finally, each CDN also offers a range of additional perks, which you might find useful:

Round 3: Performance

Testing CDNs is somewhat troublesome. I mean, there are different types of CDNs, different conditions in the network, and depending on what you’re trying to fetch (the size of the files, the main server, location, etc.), the performance can vary greatly.

For starters, there are two main types of CDN work modes, “Push” and “Pull”:

• Push is where you basically send all your files over to the CDN (actually, the software layer responsible for integrating your site with the CDN does that), and then they get served from there whenever a visitor asks for any of them.
• Pull is where you just let the CDN do all the work in the background, and whenever a file is needed – when a visitor comes to your site – the CDN pulls that file from your main server and caches it for future requests.

Then, there are issues with measuring performance of one CDN against another in a real-world environment where there’s just sooo many factors to consider.

You know how when you read a brochure for a new car, and it says that it does X miles to the gallon, but when you actually buy it you’ll never get anywhere close to that number. It’s somewhat the same with CDNs.

So when all put together, just picking some example sites that use a given CDN and measuring their performance via tools like this wouldn’t be very objective.

That being said, there are some standard performance measures that some CDN experts refer to in their comparison wars. One of them is the “initcwnd” parameter (initial congestion window – the number of packets a server sends on a new connection after the first GET request), which has a significant impact on the performance of TCP connections.

Setting all the technical details aside, it’s believed that – and I’m simplifying – the bigger the better. Years ago, before the widespread adoption of the https protocol, it was possible to get this data. CDN Planet used to publish a list and periodically update it, however, it’s been quite a number of years since they’ve done so. Given that there is no recent data to pull from, the archived information still provides us with some insight of what the initcwnd numbers looked like back then ^[3]:

• 📶 StackPath (MaxCDN): 32 packets
• 📶 CloudFlare: 10 packets
• 📶 Amazon CloudFront: 10 packets
• 📶 Akamai Edge: 16 packets
• 📶 Fastly: 10 packets

Does that mean that StackPath (MaxCDN) comes on top here overall? Well, not necessarily. As we just stated, things may have changed since that information was published.

Round 4: Under the hood

Okay, so while all of the services we’re featuring here today are content delivery networks, their inner workings tend to differ a lot. So based on what your requirements are, you’ll find some more suitable than others.

Round 5: WordPress integration

How easy it’s going to be to integrate a given CDN with your WordPress site is a key factor here. I’m sure you’d like to be able to do everything on your own, and not mess up your site along the way.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room:

None of the CDN services featured here are push-button-easy to integrate. That’s because even though we are talking about CDN for WordPress users in this article, the content delivery networks themselves aren’t built specifically for WordPress users only.

(One of the few CDNs that work like that is the image CDN included in our Optimole solution for optimizing images. All you have to do is just install it on your WordPress site. From there, you’ll have all your images sent through a CDN before they get displayed to the visitor. But again, Optimole is for images only, so it’s not a complete CDN for WordPress option like the others on this list.)

Here’s how to integrate each of the CDNs with your WordPress site:

Final round: Who uses what

In this last round, we’re going to look through some of the websites that use each of the CDNs featured in this comparison.

This information should give us a better understanding of the kind and caliber of websites that gravitate towards a given CDN. For example, if you’re just getting started with a small WordPress site, you wouldn’t want to sign up for a CDN only to find out later on that it’s basically used primarily by HuffPost-sized websites, right? That’s what this is about.

First off, let’s see how popular our CDNs are overall ^[4]:

And here’s a list of some example websites using each CDN network:

Even though I tried listing some of the more recognizable brands (at least in the WordPress community) there’s a pattern here. Amazon CloudFront and Fastly seem to be favored by mainstream companies and overall well-known brands with a huge online presence, while StackPath and CloudFlare cater to both the big boys and standard WordPress blogs (or just entry-level websites). Akamai Edge is an entirely different story on its own. With high-tier pricing this probably isn’t a solution for anyone who’s not already consuming multiple TB of bandwidth every month.

Conclusion: StackPath (MaxCDN) vs CloudFlare vs Amazon CloudFront vs Akamai Edge vs Fastly

If I had to pick one solution here to use on a new WordPress site, I would go with either StackPath (MaxCDN) or CloudFlare.

Both have very positive track records in the blogosphere and deliver really good features for the price:

• For site owners that are just starting out, I’d recommend CloudFlare. Their free plan makes it a great alternative to just get started with the concept of CDNs and speed up your site with minimal effort. From there, you can either let CloudFlare grow with you – by switching to one of the paid plans – or move your business elsewhere.
• For WordPress sites that already attract a nice chunk of traffic every day, I’d recommend StackPath (MaxCDN). The configuration possibilities of the network are really good, and it’s quite affordable, which you can see in the first table of this comparison.

Alternatively, if the core of your audience is located in a single geographical location, I’d probably go for a CDN that has the most servers in that area, even if that means your country’s local CDN network, which might not be that popular world-wide.

Let’s keep in mind that delivering your website to your core audience is the most important thing here. You won’t get much use of a CDN that has the best global coverage if your visitors are from just a single country where that network might have no servers.

Finally, here’s a side-by-side comparison table, comprised of all the individual parameters that we talked about in this resource, so that you can decide which is the best CDN for WordPress option for your unique situation:

* CloudFlare doesn’t bill based on bandwidth; the 3 main plans available (including the free one) all have different parameters based on different traits other than bandwidth.

** Akamai doesn’t showcase their pricing publicly; you need to contact the company to get a quote; that being said, they’re more on the expensive side, with price tags going even as high as $3,500 for 10 TB.

Do you know of any other good CDN for WordPress options that we didn’t mention here? Let us know in the comments section below!