Best Content Delivery Networks (CDN Providers) to Help Speed Up Your Website
If you’re looking to help speed up your website and improve your site’s statistics, then the right CDN service providers can help you do that. Here’s our pick of the best CDN’s:
- Free package available
- Easy to use user interface
- Affordable price plans
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Edge-based cloud platform
- Customisable to your sites needs
- Variety of plans available
Serving up your website’s pages from servers located worldwide helps your visitors get to the information they want quicker, improving user experience, and decreasing bounce rate and frustration.
Whether you have a small monetised blog, or large business website, just like Benjamin Franklin said “Remember Time is Money”.
The slower your site, the more money you could be losing. It might not be much in a short period, but extend that over days, weeks, months, and years, and it could be a small fortune.
We’ve hand-picked the best content delivery networks that provide a variety of options for customizing how your site is not only delivered but also protected against various malicious online attacks.
Take a look and see what you think. Visit the websites for more information, with many of them offering Free plans that can help accelerate your website(s) performance.
Our pick of the best CDN providers overall:
- Cloudflare – best overall CDN provider
- Fastly
- Keycdn
- Stackpath
- NitroPack
1. Cloudflare – best CDN provider for all
Cloudflare offers from Free to Enterprise CDN packages providing various protection and speed services like DNS, automated SSL certificates, and great performance no matter your budget.
- Free package available
- Easy to use user interface
- Affordable price plans
- Unlimited bandwidth
It’s an easy-to-use service that is perfect for a variety of business types. Whether you have a WordPress website or enterprise e-commerce site, Cloudflare offers great performance and a suitable package.
With one of the biggest global networks of servers connecting data centers in over 100 countries and 206 cities around the world, you can pick and choose which countries/continents you want to focus.
You don’t have to have any coding knowledge to get started, with an intuitive dashboard that lets you set up and monitor your site’s performance and traffic.
Whichever package you choose, you’ll be able to add extras for a small fee each month that can help with Load Balancing, Argo Smart Routing, Video Streaming, Image Resizing, and more.
There’s a Free CDN plan suitable for those on a budget that gives you some essential speed updates with the Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans adding more advanced features at extra cost.
Cloudflare is a great all-around content delivery provider used on over 7 million websites worldwide.
Pros
- Free package available
- Easy to use user interface
- Affordable price plans
- Unlimited bandwidth
Cons
- Speed performance varies per area
- Support lacking with free plan
2. Fastly
Like StackPath, Fastly offers a whole wealth of different services, one of which is an Edge-based CDN.
- Edge-based cloud platform
- Customisable to your sites needs
- Variety of plans available
They promote a reliable, speed-efficient, customizable delivery network with built-in security for your website or online applications.
It lets you scale your business around the globe, offering caching, content protection, a TLS (Transport Layer Security), and DDoS mitigation, much like the others on this CDN providers list.
Whether it’s video streaming or just improving the speed of your site for your end-users, fastly provides four different tiers of packages.
From a free trial (with limits) suitable for small-scale websites to small and midsize company packages offering more bandwidth, image optimization, and support options.
Then there are the Enterprise packages for large companies who need unlimited bandwidth with scalability in mind, along with Managed CDN for those who need other resources to keep an eye on their sites and networks.
Like StackPath, you will have to talk to one of their experts to get a price on the plans that suit your budget, as it’s based on a pay-as-you-go service.
Pros
- Free Trial (but limited)
- Edge-based cloud platform
- Customisable
Cons
- Prices not disclosed on site
- Harder to figure out over others
3. KeyCDN
A European-based CDN provider, KeyCDN offers more services than just helping you speed up the delivery of your content.
- Pay as you go payments
- Friendly user-interface
- Customise your package
They have worldwide server locations based on six continents with locations in the UK, Europe, Australia, Asia, and North and South America, with three zones (continents) available in each package with the ability to add additional zones to your plan for $1 per month.
They support content compression, live streaming, and image suppression with security features like DDoS protection, access rules, secure tokens, and two-factor authentication.
Based on a pay-as-you-go model, pricing varies depending on the regions and monthly bandwidth you use with no charges for HTTP and HTTPS requests while having a low $4 per month minimum charge, making it a $48 minimum payment for the year.
You have the option to customize your package as you need, adding additional features to help scale and protect your business now and in the future and detailed reports to see how your content is being delivered and where.
Pros
- Open payment model
- User-friendly interface
- Cheap pricing
- 14 Day free trial
Cons
- Performance lacks
- Support replies aren’t quick
4. Stackpath
Stackpath offers more than just CDN as a service. In fact, when you visit their website, it can look a little daunting for the less technically savvy website owner due to the multitude of options.
- Free SSL Certificates with option to use your own
- DDoS tech built-in
- Fast edge-based network
- Analytics features
However, head to the CDN page from their Products menu, and you’ll find everything you need to know about this top content delivery system.
They only have 35 locations around the world which are a lot less than our number one pick Cloudflare. However, they still cover a majority of the world, including the UK, Europe, North and South America, and Australia and Asia.
Their CDN service lets you accelerate your web pages, audio, and video streams, via their private network while letting your users download large files quickly without error.
You get built-in analytics from which you can see your bandwidth usage and rate depending on the Edge servers used in the network or the origin (your website).
The only downsides are that, unlike Cloudflare, they don’t offer a free CDN service and aren’t upfront about their prices with no plans or packages on site. So you’ll have to contact their sales team via the online form to find out.
Stackpath offers a CDN service aimed more toward small, medium, and large businesses than individuals and hobbyists.
Pros
- Free SSL Certificates with option to use your own
- DDoS tech built-in
- Fast edge-based network
Cons
- No Free account
- Pricing isn’t clear
- Bandwidth is limited (1TB/ month)
- Not many PoP(points of presence) locations available
5. NitroPack
A cloud-based optimization service, NitroPack provides you with everything you need to help speed up your web applications and websites.
- Easy to use software
- Smart caching & optimisation
- Priority support
From smart caching to image optimization, including lazy loading, HMTL, CSS & JS compression, and DNS prefetching, NitroPack is a robust platform aimed at improving speed.
It doesn’t offer the built-in security options that Cloudflare and the other more comprehensive CDN options do, but no matter which paid package you select, you’ll get priority support to help you when you need it.
NitroPack offers four price plans from a Free Trial with up to 5,000 page views per month to their most extensive package with 1,000,000 page views per month.
Interestingly, each package is only for one website limiting your options a little, but you can also get custom plans by contacting them if you’re looking to add more sites to your plan.
Great for individuals or small businesses looking for speed enhancements to help improve SEO and get an advantage over the competition without the need for technical skills.
Pros
- No tech skills needed to use
- Offers free trial plan (14 day money back guarantee)
- Good customer support
Cons
- Plans limited by page views
- No built-in security features
What is the best CDN?
These are just a few CDN providers that offer excellent services to help you speed up and secure your websites, web applications, gaming, or streaming services.
If you already have a web hosting plan or domain name from reputable companies, then it’s also worth a look to see if they offer a CDN option that you can add to your package.
For me, the best CDN has to be Cloudflare. They are constantly developing new ways to speed up their network and deliver the best possible solution to their clients, no matter how small or big your website or business is. Cloudflare’s free plan also helps those on a budget deliver a website worldwide at top-notch speeds.
Just remember always to do your research, try out some free trials on test sites and ask plenty of questions if you’re not sure exactly what they can offer you.
- Free package available
- Easy to use user interface
- Affordable price plans
- Unlimited bandwidth
CDN FAQs
What is a CDN?
A CDN (content delivery network) is a system that replicates the content of your website or online application from an origin server (where your site is hosted) to other servers located in different regions around the world. It helps to speed up the access for users in those end regions to your site and often has added security features built-in.
What are the benefits of using a CDN?
- Speed performance – Helps improve the load times of your website to users, helping decrease bounce rates, improve SEO, and reach users around the world quicker
- Security & Protection – Often can add an extra level of security to your website to help mitigate malicious attacks that would otherwise cripple your business/ website
- Use Less bandwidth – By traffic not coming directly to your websites hosted server but the CDN it reduces bandwidth and can help keep server costs lower
- Access to extra analytics – Get deeper insights into how your website performs, which pages are accessed and from which regions around the world
- Scalability – Ability to scale up your site with more users at the same time without compromising on speed or end-user experience
