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WPBeginner» Blog» Beginners Guide» Why You Need a CDN for your WordPress Blog? [Infographic]

Why You Need a CDN for your WordPress Blog? [Infographic]

Last updated on February 16th, 2019 by Editorial Staff
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Why You Need a CDN for your WordPress Blog? [Infographic]

We are getting tons of requests for a detailed tutorial on how to speed up your WordPress blog. In the past presentations, we have stressed a whole lot about CDN, but it still seems that we don’t clarify ourselves enough. Many beginners still don’t understand what CDN is because we are constantly asked with the question, “Would I still need hosting if I get a CDN?”. This is partially our fault for not making things clear. It was brought to our attention that every time we have written about CDN, we always ignore the basics. So in this article, we will make an attempt to explain what is a CDN, and why you need a CDN for your WordPress blog.

Update: Just to clarify, CDN is something you use on top of having a web hosting account because it helps speed up things. CDN does not replace a web hosting account. You still need to have a hosting provider like SiteGround, Bluehost, etc.

Infographic

What is a CDN and Why you need a CDN

What is a CDN?

CDN is short for Content Delivery Network which is a network of servers that deliver cached static content from websites to users based on the geographic location of the user. Pretty confusing eh? Let’s break it down in simpler words.

Normally when a user comes to your WordPress blog, they are redirected to your web host’s server (i.e HostGator). Your web host’s server is located at a central location i.e Houston, TX. So every user on your website is accessing this one server to view your website. Now if you have high volume of traffic, then you can overload your server which leads to a slow loading site or even server crash. This is where a CDN comes in handy because it is a network of servers, but most importantly these servers are spread through out the world. When you use a CDN, your static content is cached and stored on all of these servers. Static content includes images, stylesheets (css files), javascripts, Flash, etc. Now when a user visits your site (original server), the CDN technology redirects them to the closest server to their location.

For example: If your main server is hosted in Houston, TX, and someone from Durham, England tries to access it, then they will be redirected to the closest server which may be in London. This limits the number of internet hops needed to transmit the static files to your end user.

User’s proximity to your web server has an impact on load time. By deploying your content across multiple geographically dispersed servers, you can make your pages load faster from the user’s perspective. This is when CDN comes in handy. In simple words, the closer the CDN server is to where your user is, the faster the user gets the content.

Why you need a CDN for your WordPress Blog?

If you read the above section, then you can clearly see that having a CDN can make a huge impact on your website. Below are some of the advantages that we have seen on our site by using a CDN:

  • Speed – Once we started using a CDN on our site, the site got faster.
  • Crash Resistance – Thanks to you guys for sharing our articles, we have received huge spells of traffic from social media on some of our articles. If it wasn’t for the proper CDN and caching setup, then our site would crash so many times. CDN allows us to distribute the load to multiple servers instead of having 100% traffic to our main server thus making it less likely to crash.
  • Improved User Experience – Since we started using a CDN, we have noticed a decline in bounce rate on our site. Furthermore, we have also seen increased in pageviews and numbers of pages viewed by each user. So clearly a fast site means improved user experience.
  • Improvement in SEO – Google has clearly stated that faster sites tend to rank higher in Search Engines. We have noticed our site ranking higher once we did the optimization on our site.

We are using MaxCDN on our site, and they are amazing. We have met the folks from MaxCDN in person, and they are really great at support as well. You can also get 25% OFF your MaxCDN purchase if you use the coupon code: “wpbeginner“. For more coupons, check out WPBeginner WordPress Coupons.

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98 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. Kam says:
    Jun 22, 2020 at 1:18 pm

    Thanks for this helpful article.

    I am with Bluehost and recently I selected CDN and noticed that my website was loading much faster. But, some users could not access my website as the following message came up:

    ERR_SSL_UNRECOGNIZED_NAME_ALERT

    I got Bluehost to revert back to my original setting. Is their a way around this?

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Jun 23, 2020 at 9:04 am

      You would want to reach out to BlueHost’s support and they should be able to assist.

      Reply
  2. Abdullah says:
    May 6, 2019 at 9:57 pm

    Hello

    will I be losing all my blog posts if I changed my host from Hostgator to CDN network?

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      May 7, 2019 at 10:51 am

      No, you wouldn’t lose your posts when using a CDN

      Reply
  3. Chittar says:
    Apr 29, 2019 at 11:25 am

    So far following great. Just have to work on it.

    Thanks for the fluid writing!

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Apr 29, 2019 at 1:32 pm

      Glad you like our writing :)

      Reply
  4. Syed Mujtaba says:
    Aug 19, 2017 at 8:23 am

    you have told all about max cdn, where is Cloud fare?

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Aug 20, 2017 at 8:35 am

      Hi Syed,

      Please checkout how to setup Cloudflare free CDN in WordPress.

      Reply
  5. Jim Boult says:
    Apr 5, 2017 at 3:49 am

    Thank you for clarifying the purpose of a CDN. A very straightforward and easy to understand explanation. wpbeginner is a great resource and I’m starting to appreciate your value to the WordPress community!

    Reply
  6. Gagan says:
    Mar 6, 2017 at 12:26 pm

    Can you please compare some Free CDN service for low traffic site which can’t afford services like MAX CDN. Cloudflare, Incapsula and Amazon are offering free cdn but don’t know which one to choose.

    Reply
    • Jen Street says:
      Sep 22, 2017 at 11:30 am

      Yes I would be interested in the comparison between Free CDN and MAX CDN. Thanks

      Reply
  7. Erwin says:
    Feb 11, 2017 at 10:01 am

    Thanks for interesting post.
    If I understand it correctly CDN is useful for websites with international orientation, but not for websites with a national user base. I am located in the Netherlands (small country), and my website is focusing on people in the Netherlands. Am I correct that CDN is not going to improve loading speed for my customers?

    Reply
  8. Valerie says:
    Feb 8, 2017 at 11:28 am

    If a CDN is serving static content, why would one *also* need server-side and client-side caching?

    Reply
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