How to Turbocharge Your WordPress Site with MaxCDN and WPEngine in 2023
Does your WordPress site take forever to load? Are you losing visitors due to sluggish page speeds? The solution could be to start using a content delivery network (CDN) to accelerate your WordPress site‘s performance.
A CDN works by distributing your website‘s static files (images, CSS, JavaScript) across a global network of fast servers. When a visitor hits your site, the CDN serves the files from the location closest to them, resulting in much faster load times. This not only creates a better user experience but also reduces the burden on your WordPress hosting server.
While there are many CDN providers out there, one of the most popular and easy to use is MaxCDN. Trusted by over 100,000 websites, MaxCDN integrates closely with WordPress and major hosting companies like WPEngine to speed up sites with minimal setup required.
In this in-depth guide, we‘ll walk you through the process of installing MaxCDN on your WordPress site step-by-step, with a special focus on WPEngine integration. By the end, you‘ll have a lightning-fast site that keeps visitors engaged and improves your search engine rankings.
Understanding How MaxCDN Speeds Up WordPress
Before we dive into setup, it‘s important to understand what a CDN like MaxCDN does behind the scenes to accelerate WordPress.
Normally, when someone visits your WordPress site, their browser sends a request to your web hosting server to load the page. The hosting server responds by sending back all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and other files needed to display the page.
For visitors located far away from your server, this round trip can take a while, leading to slower page loads. And if you get a lot of traffic, the increased load can overwhelm your server, slowing things down even more.
MaxCDN solves this by caching your WordPress site‘s files on their global network of edge servers. They have 20+ points of presence located strategically around the world.
When you enable MaxCDN, it creates a pull zone that automatically copies your site‘s static files to their servers. Then when a visitor loads your WordPress site, MaxCDN‘s smart routing technology serves the files from the server closest to the user‘s physical location.
Instead of a single origin server handling all the requests, the load gets distributed across MaxCDN‘s network, resulting in much faster load times and reduced burden on your hosting server. MaxCDN also applies additional optimizations to your files like compression to shrink their size and further increase speeds.
The end result is that your WordPress site loads much faster for visitors anywhere in the world, even under heavy traffic. Your pages will snap into place almost instantly, encouraging visitors to browse more and improving metrics like time on site and conversions.
Why MaxCDN is the Best CDN for WordPress
While there‘s no shortage of CDN providers catering to WordPress users, MaxCDN stands out for a few key reasons:
- Close partnerships and integrations with WordPress hosts like WPEngine
- Extensive global network with 20+ points of presence across 5 continents
- Support for both push and pull zones as well as origin shield
- Automatic WordPress integration via popular caching plugins
- Real-time reporting and analytics on bandwidth, requests, and cache hits
- Competitive and transparent pay-as-you go pricing with no contracts
MaxCDN has made a name for itself as the CDN of choice for WordPress by making traditionally complex setups like CDN integration as simple as possible. The service plays nice with WordPress right out of the box.
MaxCDN also has close partnerships with major managed WordPress hosts like WPEngine. In fact, the NetDNA CDN that powers WPEngine‘s CDN feature and the MaxCDN platform are now one and the same since StackPath acquired both companies.
This tight coupling provides a seamless CDN integration for WPEngine customers. With just a few clicks, you can start serving your WordPress site‘s files from the NetDNA global edge network to speed up your site.
How to Install MaxCDN on WordPress with WPEngine
Now that you know the benefits, let‘s walk through how to actually install and configure MaxCDN on your WordPress site with WPEngine hosting.
While WPEngine has a built-in CDN powered by MaxCDN/NetDNA that can be enabled in seconds, you may want more control over the setup by integrating MaxCDN directly with your WordPress caching plugin.
Here‘s a step-by-step guide on using MaxCDN with WPEngine and WordPress:
Sign up for a MaxCDN account at https://www.maxcdn.com/. They offer a free trial to test out the service.
Once logged into MaxCDN, click the "Zones" tab and press the "Create Pull Zone" button.
Enter your WordPress site‘s domain in the Origin Server URL field. Give your pull zone a name and choose the desired settings. Then click "Create" to add the pull zone.
Navigate to the "Zones" page again and click the "Manage" link for the new pull zone you created. Take note of the URL it provides, which will look something like xxxxxx.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com. You‘ll need this later.
Log into your WordPress site and install a caching plugin that supports CDN integration. The most popular option is W3 Total Cache, but WP Rocket and WP Super Cache also work.
In your WordPress dashboard, go to the settings page for the caching plugin you installed. Locate the CDN settings tab.
Enable the CDN feature and paste in the CDN URL provided by MaxCDN (e.g. xxxxxx.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com). The exact location and steps will vary based on your caching plugin.
Most plugins also require pasting in your MaxCDN account alias, consumer key, and consumer secret to connect the APIs. To locate these, go to Account > API in the MaxCDN dashboard and click "Create New API Key".
With the API key created, copy the alias, key, and secret into the CDN settings page in your WordPress caching plugin.
Save the changes and empty your WordPress cache for good measure. The CDN should now be active!
To verify the MaxCDN integration is working, navigate to your WordPress site and inspect a few image and CSS file URLs. They should now be pointing to the "xxxxxx.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com" domain instead of your standard WordPress URL.
You can also log into MaxCDN and check the "Reports" tab to view real-time analytics on your CDN usage and performance. MaxCDN provides detailed insights into metrics like bandwidth, cache hit rates, top file types, top referrers, and more.
Measuring the Performance Impact of MaxCDN
Of course, the whole reason you set up MaxCDN on WordPress is to reap the performance benefits. So how much of a speed improvement can you expect?
While the exact results will depend on factors like your WordPress hosting plan, traffic levels, and geographical distribution of visitors, most sites can expect at least a 50% reduction in page load times after enabling MaxCDN.
To quantify the before and after difference, we recommend testing your site with tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix. Visit https://tools.pingdom.com or https://gtmetrix.com and enter your WordPress site URL to run a speed test.
Before enabling MaxCDN, you may see page load times in the 3-5 second range, with lots of time spent waiting on the server response. But after deploying MaxCDN, load times should drop to 1-2 seconds or lower. You‘ll also notice less time spent downloading assets like images from the server as they‘re now cached within the MaxCDN edge network.
These improvement in raw load times also translate into better user experience metrics like lower bounce rates and higher engagement. When your WordPress pages load almost instantly, visitors will view more pages and stick around longer.
Faster page speeds also give your WordPress site an SEO advantage, as Google has stated that they use it as a ranking factor in their search algorithm. With MaxCDN powering your WordPress site, you can rise above slower competitors in the SERPs.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of MaxCDN and WordPress
To wrap up, here are a few best practices to get the maximum value out of MaxCDN for your WordPress site:
Utilize a full-page caching plugin for WordPress like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache to cache dynamic content and further reduce server load.
Enable MaxCDN‘s SSL feature to deliver files over a secure connection and boost trust and security.
Take advantage of MaxCDN‘s image optimization tools to compress and resize large images, which are often the biggest factor slowing down WordPress sites.
Periodically review the MaxCDN reports to monitor bandwidth usage and look for opportunities to optimize your WordPress assets further.
Consider upgrading to the MaxCDN Enterprise plan for high-traffic WordPress sites to unlock advanced features like Origin Shield and additional customization.
Getting started with MaxCDN on WordPress is a no brainer for the performance benefits alone. With flexible pay-as-you-go pricing starting at just $9/month, any site can afford to get faster.
And if you host your WordPress site at WPEngine, integrating MaxCDN is even easier with the NetDNA CDN. With just a few clicks, you can start serving your WordPress site from a global content delivery network to improve speeds and scalability.
Don‘t let a slow site scare away visitors any longer. Combine MaxCDN with WordPress and WPEngine today to join the ranks of the fastest sites on the web. Your visitors (and bottom line) will thank you.
