Comparing WordPress CDNs – How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site Immediately

I’d been looking for a way to take existing WordPress sites that were loading slowly and without doing an intense audit, quickly speedup the loading time. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a nice way to give your WordPress site a quick boost in speed. It does this by taking a copy of your rendered site and serving it on servers all over the world. This creates speed in two ways.

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Advantages of CDNs Explained

The first is by having copies of your site spread across different servers that are closer to your customers. For example, if your website is hosted in Austin, but a visitor is trying to get to your site in British Columbia, CDNs place a copy of your site on a server in, say, California. This saves the client in British Columbia a lot of time getting a copy of your site which comes from California instead of Austin.

The second advantage is caching. When a client visits your WordPress site, a lot of code spins up in the background. It runs through all the plugins, does security checks, database reads, and the theme code. The result is the displayed content as you’ve configured it in WordPress. Caching instead just takes the display that would be created from all the code running, and delivers it to your client, skipping all the code running steps.

The Test

I took the two highest CDNs to test out their loading times, KeyCDN and MaxCDN. I also took GetFlywheel, a hosting platform a client uses that I’ve had great experience with who offer a CDN feature I thought it would be interesting to check out. Lastly, I thought I’d give Amazon CloudFront a try as well which requires more configuration, but I figured would benefit from all of Amazons data centers.

The Goal

To bring the server response time down below 2 seconds in alignment with Google’s speed test insights.

The Results

Product	Testing Zone	Load Time
Original Site	Eastern US	7.58
KeyCDN	Eastern US	5.98
GetFlywheel CDN	Eastern US	3.8
Amazon CloudFront	Eastern US	1.74
MaxCDN	Eastern US	1.43

In the end, MaxCDN and Amazon CloudFront both beat the 2 second load time. Ahead of that, MaxCDN outperformed Google by 310 milliseconds. While this feels like a mild difference, when it comes to serving up a website, people are impatient and visitors will not wait for your site to load the first time. That 310 milliseconds can mean lost clients long term, which is something we all want to avoid.

Additional Regions

I decided to try Amazon and MaxCDN out in two additional regions as well to see how they fared.

Product	Testing Zone	Load Time
Amazon CloudFront	Europe	3.25
Amazon CloudFront	West US	2.35
MaxCDN	Europe	2.73
MaxCDN	West US	1.96

 

The results were similar to my Eastern US test and MaxCDN stood out again with faster loading times.

Conclusion

MaxCDN stood out in my testing as the best CDN for WordPress. If you’re looking to improve the loading time of your websites, I would recommend MaxCDN.

Have you found different results? Or is there another CDN we should consider? Feel free to post in the comments below and discuss!