Installing a CDN with WordPress & Breakdance using Bunny.net

If you're building a website with WordPress and are concerned about how to optimize site performance to different users across the world, setting up a CDN just might be your answer. CDN's are a cost-effective, easy way to expand your site access to more traffic regardless of where users are in the world.

What Is a CDN?

A Content Delivery Network, or CDN, is a way to make a website faster and function more efficiently. It works by storing copies of the website's content, like images and videos, on servers located in different places around the world. When someone visits the website, the CDN (working in the background) will direct the person to the server that is closest to them. Doing so will enable the site to load faster for users and reduces stress on the main server, making the website more reliable for everyone. This is especially helpful for websites that get a lot of visitors from different parts of the world.

Who Should Use a CDN?

CDN's can benefit a wide range of websites, but are particularly useful for ones that have a global audience or receive a ton of traffic. Sites that have a lot of images, videos, or other static files can also benefit from a CDN.

If you have a WordPress website that receives large amounts of traffic from different parts of the world (or country if it's based in the US), a CDN can greatly improve the user experience by reducing page load times. If your website is an e-commerce site with lots of product images, a CDN can optimize the shopping experience for your customers.

Similarly, if your website is a media or entertainment site that relies heavily on streaming videos or music, a CDN can ensure that content gets delivered quickly and without interruption to a global set of users.

What Is Bunny.net?

Bunny is a specific type of CDN. We've been using them for about 2 years now and have never had issues. They offer a fast, powerful, and convenient integration platform with servers located in different geographic locations across the world. We love bunny because it just integrates so easily with with WordPress and Breakdance. Additionally, Bunny offers real-time analytics, custom SSL, and instant purging, as well as a pay-as-you-go pricing model and 24/7 customer support. Bunny CDN is a reliable and cost-effective solution for website owners looking to improve the performance and user experience of their website.

How Much Does Bunny.net Cost?

The pricing model for Bunny is pay-as-you-go, so you don't need to commit to anything monthly. Their standard pricing starts at 1 cent per GB for servers in Europe and North America. Now what does this mean exactly?

This means that for every 1 GB of data transfer that your website uses, you will be charged 1 cent. So, if your website receives 10 GB of data transfer, you will be charged 10 cents. "Data transfer" refers to the amount of data that is transferred from the CDN servers to the users visiting your website.

For example, if a user visits your website and views a page with a 2MB image, that would count as 2MB of data transfer. If that same user visits another page on your website and views a 5MB video, that would count as 5MB of data transfer. So, if your website receives a total of 10GB of data transfer, you will be charged 10 cents, if this traffic comes from Europe or North America.

It's important to note that different CDN providers will measure and charge for data transfer in different ways, so it's important to check competitor pricing for specific details if you decide to go with another service other than Bunny. Depending on how much it costs to run a server across continents is the reason regions like the Middle East cost more than North America.

Pricing Transparency on a Live Site

We have a CDN set up across the globe. Bunny gives a beautiful heat-map diagram to show where the majority of your traffic is getting pulled from. On average when 1000 users visit our site, we have between 5-6gb of bandwidth transferred. On average this costs about 7-10 cents. If you're trying to project metrics of cost – this might help a bit.

Setting Up a Bunny CDN Account & Pull Zone

It's pretty east to set up an account. Simply register for an account here, create a pull zone, and enable content regions. Once your account is created, you'll have to add a new pull zone. A pull zone is a location where Bunny CDN will pull your website's static content from. You can add as many pull zones as you need depending on the number of locations you want to serve your content from. For the sake of today, we'll be creating a pull zone very specific to a single website. You can name this whatever you want, but keep it memorable (if your website is goldpenguin.org, make it something like goldpenguin).

Once you've created a pull zone, you can enable content regions. This means choosing the locations where you want your content to be served from. Bunny CDN has servers located in multiple locations around the world, so you can choose the regions that best suit your audience. If your company is solely based in the US, and you only care about traffic from this region, you can disable everything besides North America. If your content should be seen across the world, you should probably enable all regions (even though they get more costly than North America). You can always come back and edit this as needed.

Integrating Bunny CDN with WordPress

To integrate Bunny with WordPress, all you have to do is install their WordPress plugin & enter your pull zone. As simple as it sounds, that's it! Once you enable the pull zone, within a few minutes your content should start getting served through a CDN.

Testing Breakdance Builder + CDN Integration

On your Breakdance site, you'll want to navigate to a page with content you can verify. We went to a recent blog post and inspected the image element (right click and select inspect element). Doing this will show you the source of the image. If it shows your pull zone name & has b-cdn.net ending it, you did this correctly. Now, all content will be routed through Bunny based on the location settings you selected earlier. You may have to give your site a few minutes before you can see this activated.

Final Thoughts

Bunny is an excellent CDN option for website owners looking to improve the speed and global performance of their WordPress website. Their pay-as-you-go pricing model, easy integration with WordPress and Breakdance, as well as things like real-time analytics make it a cost-effective and reliable solution. If you're planning on reaching a huge audience with your site, a CDN is a must.