6 Free CDN Services to Speed Up Your Website in 2024

What are free CDN services? A content distribution or delivery network (CDN) is a system of servers that distribute data and speed up web pages. A CDN is vital for reducing the delays you may experience when you try to access a web page, stream or video, or download content. 

How do free CDN services work?

Most of the websites we use aren’t geographically close to our location. You would experience a noticeable delay if you had to wait for data to travel from the opposite end of the world to your physical location.

Free CDN services reduce delays by storing cached versions of a website in numerous geographical locations across the globe. These “points of presence” deliver the same content from a server that is closer to your physical location. 

6 Best free CDN services to improve site performance

Here are six free CDN services from top providers and cloud services that offer subscription tiers or timed trials, including free CDN options. 

1. Cloudflare

Cloudflare offers fast and secure content delivery with its global network. Several big companies trust Cloudflare services with their online platforms including L’Oréal, DoorDash, IBM, Garmin, Shopify, and Zendesk. Cloudflare offers different pricing tiers and they have a free plan too.

The free plan offers security features including a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) mitigation solutions. Cloudflare is highly rated and considered one of the best providers of free CDN services. 

2. G-Core Labs

G-Core Labs has a variety of cloud services that you can try for free, including a CDN. G-Core Labs was founded in 2011, and their CDN services currently feature 25 core and edge cloud locations that are globally distributed. Fun Fact: G-Core stands for “Gaming-Core”.

The company’s infrastructure boasts a Guinness Record for the most simultaneous online players on a single multi-player online game server. They also received another record in 2014 for sustaining a load of 1,114,000 simultaneous players!

3. Netlify 

Netlify is a good choice of CDN if you are hosting a static website. Netlify offers a free demo plan that includes a global CDN and ultra-fast DNS, DDoS protection, and a custom domain among other features. You also enjoy 100GB of bandwidth included in the free plan.

Netlify hosts over 90,000 websites.

4. jsDelivr

jsDelivr offers free CDN services for open-source projects hosted on platforms such as GitHub, WordPress, and NPM.  jsDelivr has impressive stats backing the service including more than 750 points of presence and no traffic limit. jsDelivr is a reliable service for webmasters and developers as all types of files are allowed — JavaScript libraries, jQuery plugins, CSS frameworks, and fonts to name a few.  

5. Hostry

If you are looking for a CDN to support your low-traffic or new website, you’re in luck! Hostry provides you with a free and professional global CDN service with an access log of 10GB/ month for EU or USA and 5GB/ month for world traffic. You also get to analyze and control your daily traffic, and can even adjust the loads accordingly.  

6. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon, so you know you are getting a professional and powerful CDN backing your infrastructure and that you are in good company — the likes of Sony, Shopify, and Walt Disney use AWS to name a few! AWS offers various free usage tiers to suit your needs.  

The advantages of using CDNs

Free CDN services can improve your website’s performance and provide valuable support to your website’s infrastructure by doing the following: 

• Speeds up page load times — Faster load times can increase the amount of time a user spends on your page. Users are less likely to leave your site if all your pages and the content on your page load quickly. 
• Bandwidth costs — CDNs decrease how much data one server provides by caching data and this can save you on bandwidth costs.
• Increase capacity and stability — A CDN decreases any one server’s load and helps your site handle more traffic. This can stop your site from crashing so your users enjoy a continuous service.
• Website security — CDNs can also handle an influx of suspicious traffic by distributing it between the intermediary servers. This keeps your website safe as attackers sometimes send streams of fake traffic to a website to try to crash it. 
• Support multiple users — The same distribution of traffic that assists in keeping your website safe can also help you support a large number of users simultaneously. This is important for busy websites like online gaming platforms that have millions of client connections at a time.
• Real-time streaming CDNs help reliably and cost-effectively deliver rich and high-quality media files. Companies streaming video and audio use CDNs to reduce bandwidth costs, increase scale, and decrease delivery time. 

Optimize your site with WebFX

A reliable CDN is vital for high-speed content delivery to your users, for video and audio streaming, for downloading applications, and most importantly for ensuring a good user experience for your website’s visitors. Quality free CDN hosting will also offer security features to safeguard your website and user data.

Team up with WebFX now to optimize your website! We have an expert team of speed optimization professionals who get your website to load quickly and improve your users’ experience.

Chat with one of our strategists today by contacting us online or calling us at 888-601-5359!