4 Free CDNs for a Faster Website

A content delivery network (CDN) increases page loading speed by decreasing latency, but did you know there are a handful of wicked-fast, free CDNs out there hosting popular libraries like Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and Font Awesome? Well, there are. Here are 4 of them compiled by our friends at jHost.

What is a CDN?

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the globe. Their real value comes when you think about latency–the time it takes for your data to be delivered hundreds or thousands of miles away from your actual web server.

Here’s a short video from MaxCDN that explains that nerdy stuff a bit better.

Why use a CDN?

CDNs are awesome for several reason and hosted CDNs are even better in some ways.  For example, if your website uses jQuery (which it almost certainly does), instead of linking to your own copy of jQuery, use Google’s hosted libraries instead. That way, if any user has ever gone to another website that uses that same Google-hosted copy of jQuery, their browser skips downloading the file altogether and the page as a whole will load much faster.  More info on the power of using cached hosted CDNs on our post, “Let Google host jQuery.”

Without further ado, here are 4 hosted, free CDNs you can use to make your website load faster.

Google Hosted Libraries visit

The Google Hosted Libraries is a free CDN hosting the most popular, open-source JavaScript libraries.  Here’s why we’re HUGE fans of this CDN, but choices of hosted libraries are pretty slim.  If you’re using a few less common libraries, read on.

Bootstrap CDN visit

Hosted by NetDNA (which is also MaxCDN), this site offers a dedicated CDNs for the popular Twitter Bootstrap responsive framework, Font Awesome and Bootswatch.  Again, pretty slim pickings if you’re not a huge Bootstrap fan (like me).

Microsoft Ajax CDN visit

The Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network (CDN) hosts popular third party JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and enables you to easily add them to your Web applications.  If you’re an ASP.net kind of guy, this is your CDN.  If not, read on.

CDNjs visit

Again, all these only host the most popular libraries, but what about cookies.js, 960gs, or animate.css?  Enter CDNjs.  A really cool little open project supported by CloudFlare that supports this CDN hosting popular JavaScripts, CSS, SWF, images and more.  Just search and embed.  You can even upload suggestions for other libraries you think CDNjs should carry.

Combine them and save

There’s quite a bit of overlap between all these free CDNs and if you’re wondering which CDN to choose, don’t.  Use several of them on the same page.  Again, if a user has already downloaded a copy of jQuery from the Google hosted CDN (which they almost certainly have), the browser is gonna skip it anyway.

You might be concerned with added DNS lookups.  I wouldn’t worry about it.  As long as you load as few hosted CDNs as possible you’re ok.  One or two additional DNS lookups is still MUCH faster than 3 or 4 large, unminified libraries being downloaded from your server instead of a CDN.

What about your own CDN?

Mind you, these are just libraries.  To turbo charge your ENTIRE website, you’d need to host your own files on a CDN.

You can buy and manually use your own CDN (we like MaxCDN) or use a web host that comes pre-integrated with one, like jHost.

There are also several WordPress plugins that include a super-easy, pre-built API for buying and leveraging a CDN, like W3 Total Cache.