It’s obvious you will not want to lose your business due to the slow performance of a site. To cope up with the technologically advanced era, you need to ensure site security & speed by using a top CDN provider that has free image CDN benefits getting a positive impression from your website visitors.
CDN ensures the security, speed, and excellent performance of a website. You can avail the benefits of various features from free CDN service and obviously more features from paid service plan.
This article lets you know all about the paid and free top CDN providers that have image CDN feature and which CDN network you can choose for your site.
What is CDN?
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a combination of many servers which are geographically distributed to provide faster content delivery service and web security.
A CDN server delivers the web content to the end-user depending on the origin webpage and regional location.
This network is used to deliver for loading websites faster to users’ endpoint. Along with faster speed, it also provides security and protection.
CDN allows fast transmission of images, CSS Stylesheets, HTML pages, JS files, and other assets. Popular websites like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and more use it. So pointing a website with the best CDN service is worth time and money.
WordPress CDN has nothing special than widely known CDN. WordPress CDN distributes copies of websites to users around the world. Any small business can benefit from using WordPress CDN on their websites. Learn more about CDN on Wikipedia.
Types of CDN
Understanding CDN types is necessary before knowing its functional process. Based on goal and content distribution techniques, the network can be divided into –
- Content-Oriented Networks: These networks help to store and deliver static content and files. Content-oriented networks are the cheapest ones that help your websites load faster.
- Security Oriented Networks: This type of network gives you protection and security of your site content. Security-oriented networks detect DDoS attacks before reaching the server and block them.
Based on Zone, CDN divided into two types-
- Push Zone: Push zone CDN stores larger files and static content. But you have to upload the file manually on the server.
- Pull Zone: Pull zone CDN follows an automatic process to get larger files. This network system is reliable for small and medium-sized files.
How CDN Works?
CDN provides faster content loading to the users cheaply, reliably, quickly, and securely. A CDN places a server with different networks to exchange the content with improved site speed and connectivity.
Different internet providers connect to the internet and exchange points (IXPs) to allow each other access to traffic originating on various networks.
CDN providers can minimize expense and transit times. It also ensures high-speed data delivery when connecting to these highly interconnected locations.
Besides, CDN works with several optimizations, including server data transfers or client data transfers. It provides you with enhanced security and stands out from various failures or internet congestion.
Let’s say, You have a web server in the US, and your visitors are browsing from Australia. To provide a faster response to a user to all the visitors worldwide, your CDN shows the web page from the server near the page’s user.
Key Considerations Before Choosing a CDN Provider
Before choosing a CDN provider that will be best for you, fix your requirement first. Here we are giving you some specifications that you can consider before choosing your CDN Providers –
- How is DNS configuration? Is it smooth or complex?
- Does the CDN ensure the security of your site?
- How much time does it require purging a file?
- How much time does CDN take to upload a file?
- Faster than origin or not?
- Provides professional support or not?
- How is DNS response time?
- Is it able to deliver large payloads?
Benefits of Using CDN
Why should you use a CDN? Let’s see how you can get benefits from CDN.
- Decrease website loading period: Along with other optimization, CDN distributes content from the server closer to the user. When your website takes less time to load, your visitors are more likely to stay on your site.
- Less bandwidth budget allocation: CDN reduces the data extent which a server requires by a simple caching process. Even though bandwidth consumption costs more money to the owners, CDN helps owners to save money.
- More improved site security: CDN saves your server from DDoS attacks by identifying and blocking the attack. It also provides security certificates and other protection mergers.
- Improve user experience: Using CDN means your visitors will experience faster load time both on mobile & desktop.
- Helps in SEO rankings: Search engines rank those sites higher, which are user friendly, well structured, and faster in loading. CDN provides these services, which means your sites are more likely to be ranked higher in the SERPs.
8 Top CDN Providers for Speed and Security of a Website
NitroPack
NitroPack is a reliable and scalable CDN network that can help improve the speed of your website by caching content on its servers. This allows pages to load faster, reducing the time it takes for visitors to see content.
In addition, NitroPack offers image optimization features that can help reduce the size of images, so they load more quickly and consume less bandwidth.
Using NitroPack CDN can help your website rank higher in search engines, making visitors more likely to find and click on your content. Also, image optimization can help your site conserve bandwidth & reducing hosting costs.
You can use this network for any site, including WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla websites. You must sign up for a free account and start using NitroPack. But if you have a site that has huge traffic and needs more bandwidth, you can upgrade your account to a premium plan that will give you even more benefits.
Overall, NitroPack is an excellent choice for businesses looking to improve their online performance.
Grab NitroPack 5% discount for our blog readers.
Cloudimage
Cloudimage is a reliable, scalable and secure image CDN that allows you to choose from multiple CDN providers depending on your business needs.
What’s even better? They are one of the few providers that offer a multi-lingual console and support team.
Gain savings of up to 40% in CDN and infrastructure costs with Cloudimage’s easy-to-implement image and video CDN. Its free plan gives you a generous 25GB of image cache and CDN traffic each month, while its paid plan is one of the most transparent and competitive in the market.
Worried about the security of your images? Features like domain whitelisting, aliases, URL signature and URL sealing are available.
Furthermore, enjoy unlimited image transformations through its on-the-fly image optimization solution, where you get to resize, crop or compress your images via a simple parameter change.
Cloudflare CDN Service
CloudFlare is one the most popular CDN that provides reliable speed, security, and robust network with free and paid.
According to CloudFlare, websites that use their services load 2x faster than any other sites and it saves over 60% less bandwidth, provides more security, and reduces 65% fewer requests.
CloudFlare offers optimization of site speed and security of websites to protect sites from attacks. They also provide a unique analytic report that is an alternative to Google analytics.
As they track site traffic and give analytical data, so such data will help to monitor your site performance.
They have internet exchange points in over 200 cities. The service includes fast DNS, free SSL certificates, and DDoS attack protection.
Cloudflare has an intuitive user interface, but you can only explore basic features with a free plan. All the advanced features come with the paid plan as well.
Site Accelerator by Jetpack CDN
If you are concerned about using heavy-sized images, the site accelerator by Jetpack is the best choice for you, but it is better if you do not expect a complete package of this CDN service by WordPress.
Jetpack CDN provides real-time site backup, report, scan malware, real-time security protection, and image optimization for faster loading speed.
Also, Jetpack helps you by allowing the browser to download files more simultaneously and spreading bandwidth to data centers.
The free plan of Jetpack allows you to explore site statistics, content delivery networks, and downtime monitoring. They also keep your site protected from Brute force attacks, automated mobile posting, and activity logs.
To enjoy jetpack’s basic features, connect your site with Jetpack. To enjoy more benefits from it, you can upgrade to a paid plan.
Amazon CloudFront CDN
Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure and programmable CDN network that deployed 61 servers capable of transmitting and optimizing images for faster loading in a particular location.
The positive thing about Amazon Cloud front CDN is they use extensive global networks. At present, they have 215 edge locations across 89 cities.
Besides, they provide you service with advanced configurable features and ensure excellent performance and web security. It protects websites against network and application-layer attacks.
With Amazon CloudFront CDN, you can restrict content access for specific geographic locations. Also, using signed cookies technology & authorized token features, you can restrict access to only authenticated viewers.
Cloudfront integrates with other services of AWS like Amazon A3, Amazon EC2, and more. While integrating with AWS, you do not have to pay for the transfer, which is cost-effective for owners.
Amazon CloudFront offers a free tier for one year, and then you have to upgrade to a paid plan.
Google Cloud CDN
To speed up content delivery, Google Cloud CDN leverages the globally distributed edge points of Google.
Google clouds ensure faster page loads and increase engagement as it caches at over 70 cities.
They do not charge additional fees for SSL / TLS, which provides the security of your site. It connects a website’s content with the user’s nearest ISP globally using anycast architecture to improve faster loading speed.
Google Cloud CDN provides detailed latency metrics. It integrates with cloud logging and cloud monitoring. Also, it supports modern protocols to improve site performance for all arena users.
The free version of Google cloud offers you 20+ free products and $300 free credits.
Cloudinary
Cloudinary offers various features via global CDNs, including image and video optimization, video transcoding, and manipulation.
It helps you optimize your site to give users a faster page loading and visual experience, and advanced auto-responsive delivery. Also, it offers to manipulate images with a URL or based on API.
More features of this CDN network are remote fetch, auto-backup, and revision tracking. You will also get role-based multi-user administration benefits.
Cloudinary has both a free and paid plan. Free versions offer you high-performance delivery through CDN. They offer you free image and video transformation, video transcoding, and video streaming.
You can avail of their support from forums, by opening tickets, and also via mail.
BunnyCDN
BunnyCDN is one of the cost-effective CDN services configured over 50,000 pull zones. Their data transmission rate is 40,000TB worth every month.
It has worldwide 39 data centers across six continents. They provide cloud storage, software distribution, and video delivery features.
The user interface is intuitive for users and offers you free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt. Ensuring the security of a site, it allows you to block IP addresses by location.
They do not charge for the files that pass through BunnyCDN’s network. Besides, Bunny optimizer allows faster image delivery with lower bandwidth through optimization and manipulation.
Like others, it has not have a free plan for basic features. The plan of BunnyCDN varies on the resign. For a better idea, you can check their pricing and plans.
Which Image CDN Service You Should Choose In 2022?
You already know about the top 8 CDN services, which offer many features related to optimizing site speed and content, including image optimization. So now it is time to choose the right one for your WordPress blog.
According to our test and many users’ experience, Cloudimage is a faster image CDN service for any type of website. It offers a lot of features such as unlimited image optimization, aliases, URL signature, automatic caching and delivery of images to your visitors, ability to image watermarking, video compression, image formats (WebP, JPEG, AVIF), and more at a reasonable price.
Moreover, Cloudimage offers the most accurate reporting dashboard for you to monitor your site’s performance. Also, you will get 24/7 premium support.
So if you are looking for the highest quality CDN service that offers all the essential features you need to optimize your site speed and images, we highly recommend Cloudimage for your next site as an image CDN network.
Try Cloudimage Free For Personal Use
If you don’t like Cloudimage another alternative, you can use NitroPack.
Final Verdict
Over time, your site’s traffic will increase. At the same time, you have to ensure your site’s speed and performance to keep those traffic engaged to your site. That’s why you need to switch to CDN services.
We have tried to give you an overall idea about CDN and some of the best free image CDN services that are actually providing excellent services, even some of those free of cost!
So this is a perfect opportunity for you to take advantage of free services and analyze which CDN service will be great for your website!
