Question & answer

What is a CDN and do you need one?

The short answer

A CDN (content delivery network) places copies of your site on servers worldwide, so visitors load everything from a server nearby. It makes your site faster and absorbs traffic spikes. For a strictly local audience it is optional; with international visitors it is near-essential.

Without a CDN, every visitor loads your site from the one server where it is hosted. For a visitor on another continent, that means a noticeably slower visit. A CDN fixes that by copying static assets (images, scripts, stylesheets) to dozens of locations worldwide and serving each visitor from the nearest point.

A CDN also offloads your server: most requests never reach your hosting anymore. That helps during traffic spikes and forms a first shield against denial-of-service attacks. Cloudflare is the best-known name, and its free tier is enough for most sites.

Increasingly it simply comes included: Kinsta ships Cloudflare integration as standard, WP Engine bundles a CDN with every plan, and SiteGround has its own built in. If your audience is in one country, a fast server nearby is half the work and the CDN is the finishing touch.

Relevant to this question

Carefree
Kinsta logoKinsta
Kinsta Inc.
Premium WordPress
Kinsta

Kinsta Inc.

Managed WordPress4.6
From $30/moView
Carefree
WP Engine logoWP Engine
WP Engine
WP Engine

WP Engine

Managed WordPress4.4
From $20/moView
Carefree
SiteGround logoSiteGround
SiteGround
SiteGround

SiteGround

Managed WordPress4.3
From $2.99/moView