Your WordPress CDN plays a big role in TTFB, CPU usage, and security.
It can improve TTFB in multiple locations with full page caching and smart routing (i.e. Argo). And if it supports image optimization + security, it can mean 2 less resource-hungry plugins.
Your CDN’s network also plays a major role which usually shows locations (PoPs) and data transfer speeds (Tbps). These are a few critical factors that determine whether a CDN is “fast.”
Many hosts/cache plugins started offering their own CDN. They usually partner with Cloudflare or an existing CDN, then market it as their own. The downside is most of these are only partial integrations which lack features offered by the original CDN provider. For example, Cloudways only recently added full page caching. SiteGround’s CDN doesn’t do image optimization. Kinsta and WP Engine’s Cloudflare integration lack way too many features to be considered Enterprise.
Which CDN you choose can depend a lot on your hosting. Do they use LiteSpeed servers? Use QUIC.cloud. Have a WooCommerce site? Use Rocket.net with their Cloudflare Enterprise which averages a 100ms global TTFB. Want a cheap CDN that’s still fast? Use Cloudflare APO for $5/mo.
To determine a CDN’s effectiveness, benchmark your TTFB in 10-40 locations using tools like KeyCDN or SpeedVitals. I would also benchmark CPU usage before and after using a new CDN.
- Cloudflare Enterprise On Rocket.net
- Cloudflare Enterprise On Servebolt
- Cloudflare Enterprise On Cloudways
- QUIC.cloud CDN On LiteSpeed
- Cloudflare With APO
- FlyingCDN On FlyingPress
- Cloudfront
- SiteGround CDN V2
- Kinsta CDN
- WP Engine CDN
- Statically
- KeyCDN
- RocketCDN On WP Rocket
- WPX XDN
- Sucuri
- JetPack CDN
1. Cloudflare Enterprise On Rocket.net
Cloudflare Enterprise is arguably the most powerful WordPress CDN, and Rocket.net’s is best.
Cloudflare has one of the largest/fastest networks on cdnperf.com and is consistently ranked in the top 5 fastest CDNs. With Enterprise, you get additional features like APO, prioritizing routing, Argo Smart Routing + Tiered Cache, load balancing, and Mirage + Polish for image optimization. And if you have a WooCommerce or dynamic site, Argo is especially helpful for improving TTFB.
All 3 hosts offer Cloudflare Enterprise (Rocket.net, Servebolt, Cloudways). FlyingProxy used to but was recently discontinued. Which means if you want Cloudflare Enterprise (without paying an arm and a leg by getting it directly through Cloudflare), you’ll need to use one of these hosts.
What makes Rocket.net’s Cloudflare Enterprise better?
- Their CEO (Ben Gabler) was previously StackPath’s Chief Product Officer and his experience with CDNs exceeds hosts like Cloudways. Hence, why Cloudways’ Cloudflare Enterprise didn’t support APO and served annoying challenge pages when it was released.
- Their hosting is faster than Cloudways (see comparison table). Rocket.net uses LiteSpeed’s PHP (faster than Cloudways’ PHP-FPM) and you get 32 CPU cores/128GB RAM on all plans.
- It’s free with their hosting and setup automatically with zero configuration required. Servebolt’s Cloudflare Enterprise (called accelerated domains) costs $299/month which on top of their hosting, already runs about $400/month which isn’t realistic for most sites.
With a faster host/CDN, this is why Rocket.net averages a <100ms global TTFB (also who I use).
2. Cloudflare Enterprise On Servebolt
Servebolt’s offers Cloudflare Enterprise through their accelerated domains.
Both their hosting/CDN are extremely fast. They’re consistently a top performer in Kevin Ohashi’s WP Hosting Benchmarks and what larger companies (like Rank Math) use. But their plans start around $400/mo if you want to use accelerated domains. Only because this is much more expensive than what most people are willing to pay, I listed it 2nd. If you have a very heavy WooCommerce site with lots of traffic, they will definitely outperform Kinsta, WP Engine, others.
3. Cloudflare Enterprise On Cloudways
Cloudways copied Rocket.net’s Cloudflare Enterprise, so that should tell you something. When they launched it, it didn’t support full page caching and also served annoying challenge pages.
While it now supports full page caching, there’s still 1 problem: Cloudways’ hosting isn’t as fast (or good) as Rocket.net. Especially since they were acquired by DigitalOcean, there have been complaints about slower servers, price increases, and removing Vultr/Linode from the platform. Plus, their support isn’t great and the dashboard isn’t as beginner friendly (it’s hardly managed).
The main benefit of Cloudways is that it’s often cheaper than Rocket.net (because of bandwidth) and definitely Servebolt. But is it better or faster? No, Cloudways is slower than both of these. I used them before Rocket.net and can tell you there’s a big load time difference.
4. QUIC.cloud CDN On LiteSpeed
If your host uses LiteSpeed servers, you should be using QUIC.cloud.
Like LiteSpeed Cache, QUIC was designed for LiteSpeed and is also needed for image/page optimizations to work in LSC. It has a growing network of 81 edge locations + full page caching.
QUIC.cloud has a nice tutorial on setting it up:
5. Cloudflare With APO
If you’re not using Cloudflare Enterprise or QUIC.cloud, I recommend Cloudflare’s APO.
You still get the benefits of Cloudflare’s large/fast network. You also get full page caching through APO which is the single most important feature needed to improve TTFB in multiple locations. And unlike third-party Cloudflare Enterprise services, you still get access to your Cloudflare dashboard which has a ton of settings that can further improve TTFB and security.
I highly recommend this instead of SiteGround’s CDN, RocketCDN, WPX’s CDN, and Cloudflare integrations offered by lower quality hosts like Bluehost/GoDaddy. It’s faster and often cheaper.
See my guide on setting up Cloudflare APO.
6. FlyingCDN On FlyingPress
FlyingCDN is used with FlyingPress – the cache plugin I usually recommend.
It uses BunnyCDN and is not only cheaper than going through BunnyCDN directly, but it also supports geo-replication and Bunny Optimizer (for image optimization) and costs just $.03/GB. Gijo (the developer) recommends using both Cloudflare + BunnyCDN for a few different reasons:
This lets you enable responsive images in FlyingPress which resizes images for mobile (something only a handful of CDNs currently do, like Bunny Optimizer and Cloudflare Mirage).
You’ll add money to your FlyingCDN account (remember to recharge it when your balance is low), use a custom domain if you want, add a CNAME record to your DNS, then add your CDN URL to FlyingPress while selecting the types of files you want served. It’s cheap, easy, and fast.
| Bandwidth Usage | Monthly Charge |
|---|---|
| 0 to 100 GB | $3 |
| 100 to 200 GB | $6 |
| 200 to 300 GB | $9 |
7. Cloudfront
Amazon CloudFront performs well on cdnperf.com and is also used on ShortPixel.
But it’s usually not as easy to setup as other CDNs: use the video tutorial below or see written instructions. You would create an S3 bucket, then create a CloudFront distribution. They also have their AWS for WordPress plugin and 450+ PoPs which is about 2x more than Cloudflare’s.
Cloudfront Pricing
| Per Month | US, Mexico, Canada | Europe and Israel | South Africa, Kenya, Middle East | South America | Japan | Australia, New Zealand | Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand | India |
| First 10TB | $0.085 | $0.085 | $0.110 | $0.110 | $0.114 | $0.114 | $0.120 | $0.109 |
| Next 40TB | $0.080 | $0.080 | $0.105 | $0.105 | $0.089 | $0.098 | $0.100 | $0.085 |
| Next 100TB | $0.060 | $0.060 | $0.090 | $0.090 | $0.086 | $0.094 | $0.095 | $0.082 |
| Next 350TB | $0.040 | $0.040 | $0.080 | $0.080 | $0.084 | $0.092 | $0.090 | $0.080 |
| Next 524TB | $0.030 | $0.030 | $0.060 | $0.060 | $0.080 | $0.090 | $0.080 | $0.078 |
| Next 4PB | $0.025 | $0.025 | $0.050 | $0.050 | $0.070 | $0.085 | $0.070 | $0.075 |
| Over 5PB | $0.020 | $0.020 | $0.040 | $0.040 | $0.060 | $0.080 | $0.060 | $0.072 |
8. SiteGround CDN V2
There’s 1 major problem with SiteGround’s CDN: you have to use their DNS to use it which was blocked by Google for 4 days, causing 2 million SiteGround domains to get deindexed in Google.
Many people don’t know about this because SiteGround legally threatens people if they write bad reviews and controls several popular Facebook groups where they remove negative posts.
Status Update: We are glad to inform you that we have implemented a fix for the Google bot crawling issue experienced by some sites. Websites are already being crawled successfully. Please allow a few hours for the DNS changes to take effect. Thank you for your patience!
— SiteGround (@SiteGround) November 12, 2021
The lack of responsibility you are taking here is incredible. If this was simply Google’s fault, surely other hosts would be facing issues? Clearly something has changed on your set-up that has caused an issue. Are you aware just how damaging this is to many of your customers?
— Kim Snaith (@ichangedmyname) November 10, 2021
You should be advising people to move to an external DNS to resolve the issues if it is causing them massive losses in business. I have just sorted our connectivity issue in around 25 minutes by moving to googles DNS. If you had let us know 4 days ago, we wouldnt be £20k+ down!
— Jon Bunce (@thejonbunce) November 11, 2021
If you move to your Google Search Console > SETTINGS > CRAWL STATS you will, if unlucky like me, see something like this :-( pic.twitter.com/ocBEkWKsaw
— Tristan Haskins (@trishaskins) November 12, 2021
Due to poor reliability (and a worse response to the situation), I don’t recommend their CDN. You’re better off using APO, but I’d personally ditch SiteGround for ChemiCloud or Rocket.net.
SiteGround’s CDN uses Google Cloud’s network which is supposed to be fast with a large number of edge locations, Anycast routing, and dynamic caching. But in typical SiteGround fashion, the results can be much slower than what is promised if you read the comments on their blog. And on a side note, SiteGround discontinued Cloudflare and introduced their own paid CDN… which is slower, less reliable, and costs $14.99/mo (about $10/mo more than APO).
9. Kinsta CDN
Kinsta’s CDN is far from Cloudflare Enterprise.
It’s basically Cloudflare with full page caching + layer 7 firewall rules. You don’t get Argo Smart Routing, prioritized routing, load balancing, Mirage + Polish, and several other features.
Kinsta’s hosting is also a ripoff. Compared to Rocket.net, Kinsta charges $100/mo for Redis, $50/mo for Nginx reverse proxy, uses 16x less RAM, slower SATA SSDs, and has strict limits on things like PHP workers and a 256MB memory limit which get extremely expensive. With low PHP workers, no Argo Smart Routing, and SATA SSDs, they are not WooCommerce optimized.
Since you have to use poor hosting to use their CDN, I moved them near the bottom of the list.
10. WP Engine CDN
WP Engine’s CDN is similar to Kinsta’s (a partial Cloudflare integration).
However, you only get Polish and layer 3 & 4 DDoS protection. You don’t even get full page caching or layer 7 DDoS protection (or Argo, load balancing, etc). And since WP Engine’s hosting is similar to Kinsta’s (slow with lots of resource limits), they also get pushed close to the bottom.
11. Statically
Statically is a free CDN you can setup using their plugin.
It can serve images, CSS, JavaScript, fonts, and even OpenGraph images from their CDN. Statically is also a multi-CDN which means the CDN provider is chosen based on which CDN has good “health and performance.” and is chosen from Cloudflare, Fastly, BunnyCDN, Google Cloud, and CloudFront. Statically is also used by the Flying Images plugin from Gijo Varghese.
12. KeyCDN
KeyCDN only has 40 PoPs and doesn’t support key features like full page caching.
Most of KeyCDN’s data centers are located in Europe, so it would mostly make sense if that’s where your visitors are. They also developed the CDN Enabler plugin which rewrites CSS, JavaScript, and images so they’re served from a CDN, although the plugin has poor reviews.
KeyCDN Pricing
| REGION | FIRST 10 TB per month |
NEXT 40 TB per month |
NEXT 50 TB per month |
OVER 100 TB per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| North AmericaEurope | $0.04/GB | $0.03/GB | $0.02/GB | $0.01/GB |
| AsiaOceania | $0.09/GB | $0.06/GB | $0.04/GB | $0.02/GB |
| AfricaLatin America | $0.11/GB | $0.08/GB | $0.06/GB | $0.04/GB |
13. RocketCDN On WP Rocket
It only serves static files from StackPath and nothing else. No full page caching, image optimization, security, and StackPath’s network has less PoPs and slower Tbps than Cloudflare.
StackPath was also removed from cdnperf.com and caused issues with Cloudways who was using StackPath before they introduced Cloudflare Enterprise, proving it has reliability issues.
Plus, WP Rocket falsely advertises “unlimited bandwidth” when your bandwidth is very limited. They don’t list any numbers but they will cut you off eventually, so it becomes a guessing game.
14. WPX XDN
XDN is a free CDN offered on WPX Hosting.
It only has 37 locations and like RocketCDN, only serves static files from the CDN. The only “benchmark” they give is a GTmetrix report of the CEO’s homepage, but they hardly list any technical specs (which is usually a red flag). Since WPX uses LiteSpeed, you should use QUIC.
I don’t recommend WPX’s hosting. Even though they claim to be “the fastest WordPress hosting,” they target a 400ms global TTFB which is actually 300ms slower than Rocket.net.
WPX also had a global outage because they don’t use a redundancy system which their CEO called “expensive.” He blamed the outage on their partner’s CEO who died just months earlier. Had their customers used Cloudflare instead with the “always on” feature, they wouldn’t have had the consequences they had when using WPX + XDN. Both their hosting/CDN are unreliable.
XDN’s data centers are listed on their blog:
| New York/Jersey, USA (x2) | Miami, USA | Paris, France |
| Chicago, USA (x3) | Toronto, Canada | Tokyo, Japan |
| Dallas, USA | Amsterdam, Netherlands (x2) | Singapore |
| Seattle, USA | London, UK | Mumbai, India |
| Los Angeles, USA | Manchester, UK | Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Ashburn, USA | Frankfurt, Germany (x2) | Sofia, Bulgaria |
| Atlanta, USA | Moscow, Russia | Sao Paulo, Brazil |
| Kansas City, USA | Sydney, Australia | Madrid, Spain |
| Silicon Valley, USA | – | – |
15. Sucuri
Sucuri is a security service at heart so I would personally lean towards a company that specializes in the CDN field, or at least speed optimization. Plus, they only have 14 locations which is unattractive. I haven’t had a chance to try their CDN, just know it’s not widely used.
16. JetPack CDN
JetPack’s CDN is another option, but I don’t recommend JetPack.
It’s a slow plugin with features you probably don’t need. If you’re using JetPack, learn which features you’re using and install other plugins (or do things manually), then delete it. If you insist on trying it, it can serve images, photos, CSS, and static JavaScript files from their CDN.
Do You Agree?
Do you agree with these CDN rankings? I’d love to hear your own experience in the comments. And of course, any suggestions you would like to see me add to this guide are always welcome.
Cheers,
Tom
