Every time we talk about speeding up your WordPress blog/website, one of the most recommended tip is to setup CDN on your blog. (CDN – Content delivery network). Setting up CDN for the first time sounds like a rocket-science but in real, you can easily set up StackPath within minutes of work.
What is MaxCDN?
StackPath is one of the largest Content Delivery Network provider. They accelerate your website and decrease the server load. Most of bloggers and site owners use StackPath to speed up their blogs. The main reason behind their decision was website performance and SEO. After the Google Panda update, everyone knows that website load time plays a crucial role in your search engine ranking positions (SERPs). They help accelerate popular sites including The Next Web, Disqus, Stackoverflow, BuySellAds and others.
Setting up CDN (StackPath) on your blog/website requires you to do few things, and I will quickly note them:
I’ve been using Cloudways since January 2016 for this blog. I happily recommend Cloudways to my readers because I am a proud customer.
- Setup Pull zone from StackPath
- Add CNAME record to your domain
- Setting up cache plugin (Super cache in this case)
That’s it any your site will be way faster than before, as all the files will be served from the server nearest to your visitors. Also, your server load will go down by a great percentage. Since most of WordPress sites are hosted on shared hosting like Hostgator, Bluehost, Dreamhost or any other, it’s always a good idea to set up CDN, as this will speed up your site loading time. If you are not aware of, site speed is one of the ranking matrices which we can’t afford to ignore.
StackPath’s Pricing and Plans
Here is a screenshot of their Standard Plans (Up to 5TB per month). Click here to see other plans. Also, you can grab a discount of 20% with their yearly pricing.
StackPath has five standard plans up to 10TB bandwidth per month.
- 100GB Bandwidth/mo – $7.5 (Paid Annually)
- 500GB Bandwidth/mo – $32.5 (Paid Annually)
- 1TB Bandwidth/mo – $65.83 (Paid Annually)
- 5TB Bandwidth/mo – $249.17 (Paid Annually)
- 10TB Bandwidth/mo – $415.83 (Paid Annually)
Free Trial: If you use over 15TB a month you qualify for a free StackPath trial. This includes everything that comes with a StackPath enterprise account, including unlimited bandwidth, negotiable trial length, all features enabled, and one-on-one setup call.
Benefits of using StackPath:
Speed:
Once we started using a CDN on our blog, the blog got faster.
Crash Resistance:
Many bloggers have received huge spells of traffic from social media on some of their articles. If it wasn’t for the proper CDN and caching setup, then their blog would crash so many times. CDN allows them to distribute the load to multiple servers instead of having 100% traffic to their main server thus making it less likely to crash.
Improved User Experience:
Since you started using a CDN, you will notice a decline in bounce rate on your site. Furthermore, you have also seen increased in pageviews and numbers of pages viewed by each user. So clearly a fast site means improved user experience.
Improvement in SEO:
Google has clearly stated that faster sites tend to rank higher in Search Engines. It’s been a while Google made it clear that page load time is one of the search engine ranking factor and by using a Content delivery network service, you will speed up your site by a great extent. More over, it will help you reduce the bounce rate and for any Website, faster your page/content loads, better it is.
More conversion and sales:
As I explained above, it helps in improving the load time of your site and your site will be served faster. Which will result in more sales and conversion. How irritating it is, when a site takes ages to load.
If you have experiences with MaxCDN, please comment below to share with friends.
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