After all, they all promise incredible performance, lightning speed loading times and etc. So what to do, how to live in a world like that?

Okay, things aren’t actually that brutal, and there’s a methodology when selecting the best CDN for your WordPress site. We’re going to talk all about it here.

Here’s our comparison of the top CDN services for WordPress:

 

The battle of CDN services: MaxCDN vs CloudFlare vs Amazon CloudFront vs Akamai Edge vs Fastly

Let’s start by me playing Captain Obvious here, and say something that we all know … your WordPress site speed matters.

It matters for a lot of reasons. First off, people are not very keen on waiting for a website to load. In fact, 2 seconds is all you get. Again … that’s just 2 seconds! And I’m not just pulling this number from you-know-where. There are studies confirming that if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load, 47 percent of people can’t be bothered to wait [1]. They will leave and never come back.

Then there’s Google. We’ve been led to believe that Google pays attention to how fast your site loads, and based on the results, give you a bump in search engine rankings or penalize you slightly. (Here’s some data on that).

But enough with the theory…

So one of the best ways to make your WordPress site faster is to sign your site up for a CDN network.

In plain English, CDNs work by reducing the distance between your website and your target audience. It works something like that:

 

• The example on the left presents the connection without the CDN – the user has to connect all the way from Spain to the US.

• The example on the right has a CDN enabled – the connection distance for the user has shortened because now they only need to connect to the nearest CDN server, which happens to be somewhere in the UK in this case.

 

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 MaxCDN, CloudFlare, Amazon CloudFront, Akamai Edge, or Fastly?

Round 1: Server locations

Let’s start the MaxCDN 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.

Quite frankly, 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 216,000 servers in over 120 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:

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

MaxCDN

• Added security features. View and manage the people, bots, locations and types of access you grant to your assets and to your control panel.
• 24/7 live chat and phone support.
• Real-time site analytics. See how your network is performing.
• CDN API. Integrate users, zones and other resources into your applications.

CloudFlare

• Added security. Protects your website from all sorts of online threats. Including DDoS protection.
• Site analytics. View your website traffic, but also the number of threats avoided, bot traffic, and more.
• 24/7 email and phone support, but only on the most expensive plan.

Fastly

• Media streaming.
• Cloud security, TLS encryption, DDoS mitigation.
• Real-time stats.
• 24/7 email and phone support.

Amazon CloudFront

• There’s AWS Free Usage Tier allowing you to use CloudFront for free up to 50 GB of data transfer and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests / month for one year.
• Works with the AWS Management Console.
• Supports dynamic content, not just static media.
• Cache statistics reports, popular objects report, monitoring and alarming, usage charts, and more.
• Advanced security features and geo restriction.
• 24/7 email and phone support at extra charge. By default, you just get access to a community forum.

Akamai Edge

• Absolute leader in the CDN market (more on that in a minute).
• Adaptive media delivery, download delivery (for software updates, other digital downloads).
• Media acceleration products.
• Dynamic site delivery.
• Media services and media analytics.
• Predictive content delivery.
• Global traffic management.
• Cloud-based DNS.
• Advanced security features.
• 24/7 email and phone support.

 

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. Here are some reported numbers for our lineup – MaxCDN vs CloudFlare vs Amazon CloudFront vs Akamai Edge vs Fastly: [2]

 

 

Does that mean that MaxCDN comes on top here overall? Well, not necessarily, but it surely gives us some insight into each CDN’s structure and configuration, which we can take into consideration when choosing a network for our site.

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.

(The only CDN I know of that works like that is the simple one available as part of the Jetpack plugin – called Photon. All you need to do is just install Jetpack and enable the Photon module. From there, you’ll have all your images sent over to the WordPress.com content network. So why are we not talking about Jetpack in this post? Well, it has its limitations. We’ll cover that soon in another post. Stay tuned.)

Here’s how to integrate each of our 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: [3]

 

 

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 MaxCDN 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: 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 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 MaxCDN. The configuration possibilities of the network are really good, and it’s quite affordable all the way up (as your bandwidth grows), which you can see in the first table in 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: