A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can dramatically boost your website’s speed, reliability, and security by reducing load times and defending against cyber threats.
When a mobile page takes more than 3 seconds to load, 53% of visitors leave immediately. This makes a CDN essential for improving load times, reducing delays, and enhancing the user experience.
Choosing the right CDN solution can enhance two key website metrics—performance and security. Even better, free CDNs offer these benefits without any cost!
In this post, we’ll explore the best free CDNs to accelerate your site, optimize load times, and strengthen security—all without spending a dime. Let’s get started!
- 1. Cloudflare
- 2. Gcore CDN
- 3. Jetpack
- 4. Netlify Edge
- 5. Amazon CloudFront
- 6. cdnjs
- 7. Shift8 CDN
- 8. jsDelivr
- Show less
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1. Cloudflare
Cloudflare offers a global CDN that enhances website performance and security. With over 335 data centers worldwide, it delivers content from the server closest to the user, reducing latency and improving load times.
Its free plan includes features like globally load-balanced CDN, content caching, DDoS protection, an SSL certificate, a RESTful API, and global content delivery, making it suitable for personal websites and blogs.
Setting up Cloudflare takes less than five minutes, providing an efficient way to boost and secure your site.
For advanced security and performance, paid plans offer additional features such as a Web Application Firewall (WAF), image optimization, and mobile optimization.
Reputed organizations like Yelp, Feedly, Mozilla, DigitalOcean, Udacity, CodeGuard, Zopim, StackOverflow, and Reddit trust Cloudflare.
2. Gcore CDN
Gcore offers a fast CDN that operates with over 180 Points of Presence (PoPs) worldwide and a total capacity exceeding 200 Tbps, ensuring low latency and high availability for users, with an average global latency of 30 milliseconds.
They offer a free plan with 1 TB of monthly traffic; additional traffic is priced at €0.03 per GB. The free plan provides advanced features such as HTTP/3 support, a free SSL certificate, DDoS attack mitigation, an entry-level Web Application Firewall (WAF), and a log viewer.
Gcore’s CDN offers specialized solutions for e-commerce, gaming, and video streaming sectors. It integrates DDoS protection and a web application firewall (WAF) to safeguard against cyber threats.
It delivers stutter-free playback for video-on-demand and live streaming, even for 4K content, with latency as low as 0.5 to 4 seconds.
3. Jetpack
Jetpack’s Site Accelerator boosts your WordPress site’s performance by serving images and static files (like CSS and JavaScript) through Jetpack’s global CDN. This reduces server load and speeds up page loading times.
To enable it, go to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Jetpack → Settings → Performance, and toggle on “Enable Site Accelerator.”
Once activated, your site’s images and supported static assets are delivered from Jetpack’s servers, ensuring faster access and reduced bandwidth usage on your host. It works either hosted on wordpress.com or self-hosted WordPress websites.
4. Netlify Edge
Netlify Edge functions like a CDN but goes further by hosting entire sites and applications across 70+ global locations for reliable performance.
Unlike traditional CDNs with complex cache controls, Netlify instantly updates global caches with every deployment, allowing for dynamic applications with 99.99% uptime.
With Netlify Edge, you build, test, and deploy in the same environment, ensuring your previews match the live version.
It offers flexible pricing plans. The Free & Starter plan is great for personal projects, including one member seat, 100GB of bandwidth, and 300 build minutes per month at no cost. The Pro plan, at $19 per member/month, adds more build minutes, team collaboration, and enhanced support for growing projects.
5. Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a fast, secure, and highly scalable CDN that speeds up websites, applications, and media delivery worldwide. It delivers caching content at over 600 global edge locations, reduces latency, and improves user load times.
With built-in security features like traffic encryption, access controls, and AWS Shield Standard for DDoS protection at no extra cost, CloudFront ensures secure content delivery. It integrates with AWS services like S3 and EC2, optimizing performance while maintaining security with AWS WAF and HTTPS support.
CloudFront enhances content delivery with intelligent routing, HTTP/2 and QUIC support, and real-time analytics for traffic monitoring. It also offers customizable cache behaviors, origin failover, and access controls, making it ideal for dynamic content, live streaming, and API acceleration.
It’s a free tier that offers 1 TB of data transfer, 10 million HTTP/HTTPS requests, 2 million CloudFront Function invocations, and free SSL certificates every month, with no feature restrictions.
6. cdnjs
CDNJS is a free, open-source CDN managed by Cloudflare that hosts popular JavaScript frameworks, CSS files, and other web resources. It offers fast, reliable access to libraries like jQuery, Bootstrap, and React, helping developers reduce server load, cut latency, and improve website performance.
With its extensive library and easy integration, CDNJS is a top choice for developers looking to streamline projects while maintaining security and efficiency.
7. Shift8 CDN
Shift8CDN provides a free CDN service that improves website performance by distributing static assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript across a global server network. Its network spans multiple locations worldwide, including the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.
Shift8CDN offers both free and premium plans. The free plan includes up to 1TB of bandwidth per month. It also integrates smoothly with WordPress (via a plugin), Laravel (via a package), and Drupal (via a module) for easy content optimization.
8. jsDelivr
jsDelivr is a free and fast open-source CDN that helps developers host and serve JavaScript libraries, CSS frameworks, fonts, and other static assets. It supports npm, GitHub, and WordPress plugins, making integration easy across different web development workflows.
It uses multiple CDN providers—Cloudflare, Fastly, Gcore, and BunnyCDN—to ensure high availability, redundancy, and fast load times by routing traffic to the best-performing node. With over 540 points of presence worldwide, including China, jsDelivr delivers reliable performance.
You can load multiple files in a single HTTP request with no traffic limits. Its infrastructure is built for speed and security, offering intelligent load balancing, instant cache purging, and DDoS protection, making it a solid choice for any website.
Why is CDN Important?
Website speed directly impacts user experience, conversions, and business success. Studies show that even minor improvements in load times can drive significant results.
For example, Renault analyzed 10 million visits and found that optimizing Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)—a key speed metric—led to a 14% drop in bounce rate and a 13% increase in conversions when reduced by just one second.
Similarly, Vodafone improved LCP by 31%, resulting in:
- 8% increase in sales
- 15% rise in lead-to-visit rate
- 11% boost in cart-to-visit rate
These results prove that website speed directly influences user behavior and revenue.
One of the biggest obstacles to fast loading times is latency—the delay caused by the physical distance between users and servers. A CDN solves this by:
- Caching content closer to users to reduce load times
- Minimizing bandwidth usage for better efficiency
- Acting as an intermediary between users and the website’s main server
By improving website speed, a CDN enhances the user experience, reduces bounce rates, and increases conversions—making it an essential tool for businesses looking to optimize performance.