Blog

In this post, we will check out the 10 best free CDN providers in 2023 to speed up and secure your website.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are becoming increasingly popular as websites and applications seek to improve their performance and user experience.

CDNs work by caching static content like images, videos, and HTML files on servers located in different geographic locations, enabling faster access to these files from anywhere in the world.

While some CDNs charge for their services, there are several free CDN providers available that can help website owners and developers optimize their website’s performance without breaking the bank.

In this article, we’ll highlight 10 of the best free CDN providers available in 2023, based on factors such as ease of use, reliability, and available features.

These CDNs are suitable for a wide range of use cases, from small personal blogs to large enterprise websites, so read on to find the right one for your needs.

What is a CDN – Content Delivery Network?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of servers distributed across the globe that works together to deliver content to users efficiently and quickly.

When you request content from a website, such as images, videos, or other media, the CDN will identify the closest server to your location and retrieve the content from there, rather than from the origin server. This process reduces the latency and improves the load time of the content.

CDNs are used by many websites and online services to improve their performance and user experience. The CDN system caches frequently accessed content on servers located at strategic points around the world.

This means that the content can be served to users more quickly because it is stored closer to them. Additionally, the CDN can dynamically route traffic to different servers based on network conditions, ensuring that users are always accessing content from the fastest and most reliable service available.

CDNs can also provide additional benefits, such as improved security and scalability. By distributing content across multiple servers, a CDN can better protect against DDoS attacks and other malicious traffic.

CDNs can also scale quickly and easily to accommodate increased traffic without requiring additional resources from the origin server.

Overall, CDNs are a critical component of modern internet infrastructure. They enable websites and online services to deliver content to users more quickly and efficiently, improving the user experience and helping businesses to grow and thrive in a highly competitive digital landscape.

Why there is a need for a CDN?

Even if you have a new or an old website, I personally recommend you go for CDN. It eventually helps you to reduce the time to load your site which in turn improves your ranking in Google searches.

As a user, I never prefer to wait for a second if it does not load instantly. One of the biggest advantages of having a CDN is to ensure a faster experience for your users, but they also serve to block site crashes in the case of traffic waves.

CDNs serve to allocate bandwidth across multiple servers, instead of letting one server handle all traffic.

That’s why we use a CDN. It advances content delivery by providing content from the server that is nearest to the visitor. Thus decreasing the loading time and instantly allowing visitors to access websites.

Another benefit of having a CDN is security. Security is another important thing for all of the websites and top CDNs solve this issue efficiently.

Cyber attacks are common these days and they can hamper and damage your website and reputation. So for speeding up the website and security you definitely need a CDN.

Features Of CDN

Now let’s go ahead and check out some of the top features of CDN. Have a look at the following features.

1. Global server network:- The main advanatge of having CDN is that is saves static content of website and serve it quickly with a closests serving network which in turn speed up the process to access website.
2. Caching:- Most of CDN comes with a caching capabilities. Caching is phenomena in which copy of your website will be temporarily stored in the user’s browser, which if later accessed by the browser turns up to load instantly. There are also multiple plugins for it, if you take my recommendation i would surely recommend you to go for WP Rocket.
3. Image and video optimization:- CDN also have service for image and video optimization which ultimately decrease your website’s load time. As reports suggest video and images always impact the user experience and speed of the website.
4. Minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML:- CDN also capable of minifying the CSS, Javascript and HTML. These are excess codes which are not too beneficial for the website.

10 Best Free CDN Providers 2023

1 Cloudflare

When it comes to free CDN, nobody can beat Cloudflare. It is one of the best and full features CDN which completely fastens your website and adds security to it.

Cloudflare is a CDN designed particularly to make websites more secure, private, fast, and reliable. They have more than 200 data centers across the world.

They also offer firewall, DDoS protection, rate limiting, bot management, VPN, and more.

Some of the top features included in the free plan are:-

• Fast, easy-to-use DNS
• Caching
• HTTP/2 & HTTP/3
• Global content delivery network (CDN)
• Minification
• DDoS protection
• 3 Page Rules
• HTTPS Rewrites
• Page rules

The free features that you will get with Cloudflare’s free plan are just unbeatable. It equally takes care of your site security and performance very well.

Most of the hosting companies and caching plugins are totally compatible with Cloudflare. If you have a website in WordPress then I highly recommend you to use it.

Cloudflare’s free plan has everything that a particular website needed to increase its website speed. However, if you want some extra features then you must go with the premium options. Cloudflare tops the list of the top 10 best free CDN providers.

2 NitroPack

NitroPack is one of the best free CDN available in 2021 for speeding up the website to the maximum. Google has released its core web vitals updates and fast websites surely gonna ahead in the google rankings.

It’s pretty safe to say NitroPack would be the safe bet if you are seriously want to increase the speed of your website.

A few of the advantages of using Nitropack are:-

1 Increase conversion rates

2 Advanced caching capabilities

3 HTML, CSS, and Javascript optimizations

4 It also boosts rankings in SERP results.

If you have NitroPack you don’t need any caching plugins, code optimization plugins, and image optimization plugins.

3 BunnyCDN

Bunny is without a doubt a great CDN for the speed and security of your website. It is nearly a free CDN in the market. Bunny CDN plan starts at a cost of $1/month.

There is also no upfront cost to start using the service. BunnyCDN starts with $0.01/GB for Europe and North America Traffic.

Perma Cache feature is one of the exciting features in BunnyCDN that enables you to permanently store a copy of your files on the edge storage for a 100% cache HIT ratio. Which in turn means maximum performance.

Users also get a free SSL certificate which they can install with a click of a button using simple Let’s Encrypt integration. Instant Purging allows to always make sure that the content is always up to date.

4 Arvancloud

ArvanCloud CDN includes tens of PoP sites in major locations all around the world to deliver online content to the users.

As it is located in a major location it tends to deliver the content from the closest geographical region which in turn improves the speed and quality for consumers.

ArvanCloud also provides great security as it has the latest technology to protect websites and their online contents against all types of cyberattacks, hacking and DDoS attacks.

ArvanCloud is one of the top and robust CDN which provide services to a number of websites. If you compare the free plan of ArvanCloud with the others CDN-paid plans, you will surely go with the ArvanCloud.

It has an abundance of features that are too free of cost. So if you are planning to have a full-featured CDN experience, go with ArvanCloud CDN.

5 Site Accelerator by Jetpack

Site Accelerator by Jetpack is a CDN but specifically for image acceleration. Most of the people don’t know as there is a particular CDN for the image as well.

I highly recommend using a CDN for images as images are also one of the culprits for slow websites.

It accelerates your site speed with faster images processing and static files. The CDN also Decreased load times for your users.

To enable the site accelerator, you have to install the Jetpack plugin in WordPress. Some of the top features of site accelerator are:-

1 Serve all images, photos, CSS, and static JavaScript files from the servers located near to geographical region.

2 Automatically resize images for mobile devices.

3 CDN services of site accelerator are completely free.

Other than the site accelerator, there is another tool you can use for images is Cloudinary. We will talk about it at the end of the article.

6 Netlify

Netlify does not need any introduction in this list. It helps to host the websites in which the source files will be stored in the version control systemGit and then formed into static files to be served via Content Delivery Network.

Netlify does not come in the category of CDN, however, if you are really interested in hosting a static site, then Netlify would be on your priority list.

Netlify has a lot to offer as complete free features:-

• Automated builds from Git
• Deploy to global Edge network
• Live site previews with a collaboration UI for team members
• Instant rollbacks to any version
• Deploy static assets & dynamic serverless functions

7 JsDelivr

JsDelivr is a free CDN for open-source projects. The CDN can be used to serve web files directly from the npm registry and GitHub repositories without any further arrangements.

It is currently the second most famous public CDN that hosts multiple projects. JsDelivr is also the official CDN of Bootstrap.

JsDelivr is capable enough to offload JavaScript libraries, jQuery, fonts, CSS, and a lot more to make your site as fast as possible.

Another added advantage of using JsDelivr is that it can load multiple files using a single HTTP request, and there is no traffic limit. JsDelivr is number 7 in our list of top 10 best free CDN providers in 2023.

8 Incapsula

Incapsula acts as a CDN to provide web application security, DDoS mitigation, content caching, application delivery, load balancing, and failover services.

It caches the content while assuring the freshness of the article. Incapsula comes into its inception in 2009 and they have done a remarkable job for more than a decade now.

Imperva’s global CDN improves connection and response activities while reducing bandwidth costs.

Incapsula also secures your website against DDoS Attacks. Incapsula is number 8 in our list of top 10 best free CDN providers in 2023.

9 CoralCDN

CoralCDN is a completely free CDN. The Coral Content Distribution Network, sometimes called Coral Cache or Coral. It is designed and managed by Michael Freedman.

Coral uses the bandwidth of a worldwide network of web proxies and nameservers to imitate web content, which ultimately reduces the general load on websites and thus increases page speed.

The process is simple, you just have to add .nyud.net to the hostname of any URL, and the rest has been handled by the CoralCDN. There is also a plugin to make it simple, however, I will not recommend it as it t is not been updated for a long time.

10 Cloudinary

Cloudinary is a cloud-based image and video management service. It allows users to upload, store, handle, manipulate, and deliver images and video for websites and apps.

Cloudinary is used by more than 1 million web and mobile applications which include some of the big names in the industry like Dropbox, Forbes, Outbrain, and Taboola.

Offloading images is always a recommended step to improve page speed. Offloading media could save a lot of valuable bandwidth. 

Cloudinary host your images, resize them with a blink of an eye and deliver them with global CDN to improve speed for the websites. Users can opt for a forever free plan offered by Cloudinary.