How To Add CDN to a Breakdance Builder WordPress Website

If you are building a website targeted at users across a large geographical region, you may want to consider using a content delivery network (CDN) on your WordPress website. A CDN can significantly improve the loading speed of your website by caching your content on servers located closer to your visitors. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to add a CDN to your WordPress website built with Breakdance Builder.

What is Website Caching?

Before we get started, it's important to understand what caching is and how it works. Caching is a technique used to store frequently-accessed data in a temporary location so that it can be quickly retrieved later. For example, when you visit a website, your web browser will cache certain elements of the page (such as images) so that they don't have to be downloaded again the next time you visit the site.

A website cache is refreshed periodically, so it's possible that you may not see the most up-to-date version of a page if you visit it frequently. However, for most users, caching provides a significant speed boost because they don't have to wait for large files to download each time they visit a website.

What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

A CDN is a network of servers that are strategically placed in locations around the world. Each server acts as a content delivery tool, and they work together to reduce latency (the time it takes for a web page to load). In other words, CDNs improve your browsing experience by speeding things up.

For example, let's say your WordPress site is hosted on a server in New York. Without a CDN, each of your visitors would have to download all of your website files from New York. This wouldn't be a problem if your site visitors are all from the same general area. But if you have visitors from all over the world, they could experience long loading times due to the distance the data has to travel.

With a CDN, your website files are cached on servers located in multiple countries around the world. So when a visitor from Australia tries to access your site, they'll be able to load your content from a server that's closer to them, resulting in faster loading times.

Benefits of using a Content Delivery Network

There are several benefits of using a CDN which you can get for a very affordable price across a variety of different platforms.

-Improved website performance: A CDN can help your website load faster by caching your content on servers located closer to your visitors. This is especially beneficial if you have visitors from all over the world.

-Reduced bandwidth costs: By caching your content on multiple servers around the world, you can reduce the amount of bandwidth your website uses. This can lead to significant cost savings, especially if you have a high-traffic website.

-Improved security: A CDN can help protect your website from attacks by distributing the load across multiple servers.

-Improved reliability: By caching your content on multiple servers, you can improve the uptime of your website. If one server goes down, your website will still be accessible from other servers.

Setup CDN in Breakdance Builder in WordPress

We use Bunny.net for our CDN service. You can use any CDN provider you want, but we recommend them because it's easy to set up and affordable.

Step 1: Configure your Pull Zone

The first thing you need to do is set up a "pull zone" with your CDN provider. A pull zone is a location where your website files will be cached. With Bunny.net, you can create a pull zone by logging into your account and clicking on the "Pull Zones" tab.

From there, add a pull zone and name it something like "example" (replace example with your actual domain name without the .com). Enter the original URL (the whole URL of the website, not just the domain name) into the "Origin URL" field. Under pricing zones, select the continents where you want your content to be cached and click "+ Add Pull Zone".

Now that you have a pull zone set up, you need to configure your WordPress settings to use it.

Step 2: Install & Configure the BunnyCDN WordPress Plugin

Bunny.net has a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to configure your WordPress settings to use their CDN service. You can install the plugin by going to Plugins > Add New and searching for "Bunny".

Once the plugin is installed and activated, go to Settings > BunnyCDN and enter your Pull Zone Name (this is the name of the pull zone you created in Step 1)

Make sure to check the "Update CDN Settings" box and click "Save Changes". And that's it! Your WordPress site is now using a CDN.

If you want, you can further reduce your costs in advanced CDN settings by disabling the CDN for logged-in users

Test CDN Activation

To test if the CDN is active, you can use a tool like GTmetrix. Just enter your website URL and check to see if the static files (like images, CSS, and JS) are being served from the CDN. If they are, then it's working!

You can also check the "Network" tab in your browser's developer tools to see if the static files are being loaded from the CDN. You can inspect element on an image in Google Chrome and see where the origin URL is located.

Conclusion

A content delivery network (CDN) is a great way to improve the performance of your website, reduce bandwidth costs, and improve security. In this article, we showed you how to add a CDN to your Breakdance Builder WordPress site. Using a CDN is relatively affordable and easy to set up, so if you're looking to improve site loading speed, try it out today! Do you have any questions about how to add a CDN to your WordPress site? Let us know in the comments below!