Website speed is part and parcel for a good ranking in Google, and one of the biggest bottlenecks are images due to the size. If you own a small site with average traffic, you should give these free CDN a try. For those in the dark, a CDN is a service where they deliver your images via their network of servers around the world closest to the visitors.
See More ▼ 13 Premium DNS Hosting – Low Latency & Faster Performance
I highly recommend Cloudflare, it is perhaps one of the very best CDN service providers that offer all round robust free CDN service and security. It is free irrespective of how much traffic your site’s generating, the only million dollar question is, how do they make money when their pro and enterprise plan is equally cheap?
1. G Core CDN
1TB Bandwidth/month | Images and Videos
Free for personal websites and blogs, G-Core Labs is a content delivery network (CDN) and cloud services provider with a focus on media business and entertainment industry. The company was founded in 2011. The name (“G-Core” means “Gaming-Core”) is due to G-Core Labs’ roots in online gaming: building the server infrastructure for Wargaming.
- HTTP/3 (beta) – Deliver content over HTTP3 — the newest and safest version of HTTP
- Free Let’s Encrypt SSL – Issue an SSL certificate for free to deliver content over HTTPS
- Brotli compression – Reduce file and image size with the Brotli compression method
- WebP and AVIF compression – Compressing images could deliver up to 85% file size savings
- Free basic WAF – Protect your app from the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities
2. Cloudinary
5GB Bandwidth/month | Images and Videos
Still Managing Your Images In-House? Use Cloudinary’s image service instead. With simple integration that developers will love you’ll get immediate access to cutting-edge image capabilities. Save R&D time, get to market faster, reduce your IT costs and improve your viewers experience. Get your images delivered lightning-fast, responsive and highly optimized for any device in any location. Images are served via Akamai’s worldwide CDN.
- 75,000 total Images & Videos
- Upload images to a cloud-based storage – Fast image uploads: secure upload API, version management, remote upload from public URLs, direct uploading from the browser, image transformation on upload, private images support.
- Fast CDN delivery with advanced caching – High performance delivery through CDN. Multiple CDN support – Amazon CloudFront and Akamai. Virtually limitless scale. Public HTTP and secure HTTPS access to resources, multiple CDN subdomains support and smart cache settings.
- Safe high-end storage, leveraging Amazon S3.
3. Cloudflare
Unlimited + Basic Web Security
They offer a Free plan for small personal websites, blogs, and anyone who wants to evaluate Cloudflare. Their mission is to build a better Internet. They believe every website should have free access to foundational security and performance. Cloudflare’s Free plan has no limit on the amount of bandwidth your visitors use or websites you add. If you want to make your site even faster and more resilient, you can easily upgrade to one of their higher tier plans.
- Globally load balanced content delivery network (CDN)
- Asynchronous Javascript Loading Rocket Loader
- HTTP/2 and SPDY
- Smart Routing
4. Jetpack Photon
Unlimited Bandwidth / Images Only
Photon by WordPress is an image acceleration and editing service for sites hosted on WordPress.com or on Jetpack-connected WordPress sites. That means less load on your host and faster images for your readers. The drawback with Photon is images are hosted on their domain, meaning to say the URL of your images cannot be customized to match your domain.
5. Swarmify
10GB Bandwidth | Image and Videos
To date, over 5300 WordPress site owners have deployed Swarmify’s image acceleration plugin and generated scores of 5-star reviews in the process. Simple to install and configure, their WordPress plugin powers image delivery for some of the busiest WordPress sites around. Between Hyperlocal geo-serving and lazy loading, images load swiftly and bandwidth is saved.
6. Amazon CloudFront
50GB Bandwidth or 12 Months Free | Images and Videos
Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. CloudFront is integrated with AWS – both physical locations that are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as other AWS services.
CloudFront works seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code closer to customers’ users and to customize the user experience. Lastly, if you use AWS origins such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 or Elastic Load Balancing, you don’t pay for any data transferred between these services and CloudFront.
7. Hostry
Free 10GB/month
Hostry CDN is an excellent option for those who need an advanced CDN network with global coverage and minimal latency without overpaying. Hostry CDN network has been created to turbo-charge your website with speed and guarantee the lowest latency possible, while maintaining faultless performance.
With fewer hops, visitors from different regions can enjoy incredibly fast page loading. Single IP makes performance control convenient on the global level. Free CDN package ensures a lifetime free CDN for startups and beginning webmasters.
8. Incapsula
Unknown Bandwidth + Security
[ Discontinued ] The Incapsula Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a global network that uses intelligent caching and cache control options, as well as high-speed storage and optimization tools to improve your website performance while lowering bandwidth costs. On average, websites using the Incapsula CDN are 50% faster and consume up to 70% less bandwidth, benefiting from our:
- Dynamic caching technology based on machine learning
- Reliable, self-healing mesh network topology
- Peered, Tier 1 transit system for optimal coverage
- Extensive cache control options
- Instant cache purge and cache rule propagation
- Security and bot management features
Conclusion
If you are serious in growing your website, always go for paid plans. Free services like these then allocate minimal resources such as slower bandwidth. Cloudflare is the best in terms of pricing, speed and performance. It is more than a CDN, it provides security protection and more. Amazon CloudFront is another good option, as is MaxCDN.
