6 FREE CDN to Speed Up and Secure Your WebSite

Fix two critical metrics of your website – Performance & Security by implementing the right CDN solution

Nobody likes a slow-loading web page, and it may potentially cost millions in lost sales. Some of the insightful facts:

• Shopzilla increased revenue by 12% by improving load time from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds.
• Amazon estimated one-second slowdown could cost $1.6 billion in sales each year
• 21% of shoppers exit shopping carts due to slow processing
• Google considers page load time in technical SEO signal, so not just revenue but also having fast loading helps in better search ranking.

Security is equally vital to website performance, and you must consider doing all it takes to keep your web assets protected from being hacked.

Not having the necessary web security protection can help an attacker quickly take down your website and damage your reputation and online business. The latest report by SUCURI shows 50% of the websites had security risks.

So you see, both are essential to any online business website. There are multiple ways to address this and, one of the easiest ways is to implement CDN for performance cloud-based security providers for protection.

The good thing is most of the CDN companies offer both! Let’s go through them and see which one works for you.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is one of the most modern solutions to supercharge your website and add security. They power more than 20 million Internet assets and have a presence in more than 200 data centres.

Some of the following useful features offered by CloudFlare in a FREE plan:

• Globally load-balanced CDN
• Content caching, instant purge caching
• Async Javascript loading (Rocket Loader)
• IPV6
• HTTP/2 & HTTP/3
• WebSockets
• Restful API
• Basic DDoS protection
• TLS 1.2, 1.3
• Cloudflare issued certificate
• HTTPS Rewrites
• Comment spam protection, content scraping protection
• DNSSEC
• Operational & Threats insights
• Page rules

You can set up your website with Cloudflare in less than five minutes. It’s a great deal to supercharge and secure your website.

If you are serious about security, then you may consider a pro or higher plan to enjoy WAF, Image optimization, mobile optimization, and much more.

I think it’s worth mentioning Cloudflare apps, which make the integration easy without installing anything.

Ex – you can have Google Analytics, Pingdom Swiftype, and engage enabled without installing any code.

Who is using Cloudflare?

That explains how popular Cloudflare is. Here are some of the big names using Cloudflare.

• Yelp
• Feedly
• Mozilla
• DigitalOcean
• Udacity
• CodeGuard
• Zopim
• StackOverflow
• Reddit

Gcore CDN

Gcore has a great content delivery network of 140 data centers. This means blazing-fast websites for every user spread across the globe. Besides, its 30ms average response time makes it one of the fastest CDN out there.

Moreover, it has a generous free plan to test the waters. The FREE tier includes 1 TB of traffic per month.

• Some of the advanced features include:
• HTTP/3 support
• Free SSL certificate
• DDoS attack mitigation
• Free entry-level WAF
• Log viewer
• Image optimization service
• Full-fledged API
• Terraform support

They offer 100% uptime and premium support in multiple languages.

Site Accelerator by Jetpack

Formerly known as Photon is not the complete CDN instead of an image acceleration service. If you are using WordPress and heavily use images, then Site Accelerator would be a value-add.

You can leverage Site Accelerator to offload the image files bandwidth to load the images faster. You can enable it through the Jetpack plugin dashboard, and works either hosted on wordpress.com or self-hosted WordPress websites.

Alternatively, you may try Cloudinary for image & video management in the cloud.

Cloudinary works on any platform, so if non-WordPress and looking for image optimization, then worth giving a try.

If you serve mostly video then you should check out these videos and stream CDN platforms.

Netlify

Netlify lets you host your static website and serve them through CDN. Netlify is not a typical CDN company, but if you are hosting a static site, then it would be worth considering Netlify.

More than 35,000 developers and hosting more than 90,000 websites love Netlify.

Netlify offers the following in the FREE plan.

• Redirect rules
• Continuous Deployment
• Let’s Encrypt certificate, HTTP/2
• Custom domain
• Global CDN, Ultra-fast DNS
• Rollbacks
• Prerendering, Cache invalidation
• DDoS protection
• Git integration
• Custom HTTP Headers

jsDelivr

Leverage jsDelivr to offload open-source components like JavaScript libraries, jQuery, fonts, CSS, and much more to load the website resources faster.

jsDelivr serves the files from Cloudflare, fastly, Quantil. Altogether, they got more than 750 points of presence, including China. You can load multiple files using a single HTTP request, and there is no traffic limit.

Hostry

Are you running a startup or a low-traffic website? Hostry provides 10GB for EU+USA and 5GB for world traffic under the FREE package.

Hostry got 52 POP worldwide and provide an origin shield.

Conclusion

I hope the above service helps you to make your website load faster and safe. Above listed services are all free to try to see what works best for you.