MaxCDN Review

CDNs are a powerful tool for bloggers because they speed up your website and reduce the strain on your server by storing static files (Images, CSS, and JS) across servers worldwide.

MaxCDN happens to be one of the largest and most popular CDNs out there.

And although MaxCDN is very affordable, I understand that parting with $39.95 can be a difficult decision at times. So, please allow me to share my experience of MaxCDN with you.

Why We Chose MaxCDN

At the first of this year, I noticed that one of the websites I work with seemed to be lagging when I loaded it. This particular website is for a small business, so we weren’t too concerned about the SEO aspects of having a slow website. But, we were concerned that potential customers were getting to the page, getting frustrated at how slow it was, then leaving (which could be costing the company quite a bit of money).

Because of the slow load times, I immediately began looking into a CDN solution, and decided that MaxCDN the best option since:

• MaxCDN integrates well with WordPress and W3TC.
• MaxCDN is affordable with plans as low as $39.95 per year.

With these goals in mind, I tested the speed of the local business’s website before starting the integration (results below) then I got to work.

Using the W3TC plugin, I installation was fairly quick and painless. The only issue I ran into was since I was using the new MaxCDN interface, I couldn’t find the information needed to integrate. As soon as I switched over to the old interface, the instructions I was following were a piece of cake!

There’s really only a few steps, so installation was done in about 10 minutes.

The Results of Using MaxCDN

I was very impressed with the results of integrating the website with MaxCDN, especially since it only cost this small company $40 a year. Below are the before and after screenshots.

You can see that the page was loading at 5.3 seconds before MaxCDN and at less than 4 seconds after MaxCDN. That’s over one whole second that we were able to shave off in just a few minutes with installing MaxCDN. You may be wondering now how much is a second worth?

Here is an infographic from KISSmetrics that does a good job of explaining how just one second can affect the performance of your website, especially how much money your site could make!

Before Results

After Results

Bottom Line

When you are looking to speed up your website for your readers’ experience and for SEO benefits, MaxCDN is low hanging fruit. MaxCDN is very affordable at $39.95 per year  and takes less than 15 minutes to install.

I highly recommend that you take advantage of this service.

What Do You Think?

CDNs have grown very popular over the past few years, because they are great for increasing your website speed which will give your readers a greater experience and better your SEO.

Do you currently use a CDN? Have you thought about using a CDN? Leave your thoughts below in a comment.