CDN (Content Delivery Network)

A Content Delivery Network is a geographically distributed network of servers that stores cached copies of your site’s assets and, in some configurations, your full page HTML. When a visitor requests a page or file, the CDN routes that request to the server closest to them rather than sending it all the way to your origin server. The result is lower latency and faster load times, especially for visitors who are geographically distant from where your server is hosted.

CDNs are commonly used to serve static assets — images, CSS, JavaScript files — but many CDN providers also support full-page caching and edge logic that can handle dynamic behavior at the CDN layer.

Popular CDNs include Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, Fastly, AWS CloudFront, and Akamai. Cloudflare in particular is widely used as both a CDN and a security layer, and its free tier covers most small-to-medium traffic needs.

CDNs in WordPress Hosting

WordPress sites often rely on CDNs to compensate for the performance overhead of PHP rendering and database queries on every page load. A CDN in front of a WordPress site can cache full pages for anonymous visitors, dramatically reducing origin server load. Plugins like WP Rocket and CDN Enabler help configure WordPress to serve assets through a CDN URL. Managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine and Kinsta typically include a CDN as part of their hosting stack.

CDNs with Statamic

Statamic works well with CDNs, and the combination becomes especially powerful when you enable static caching. Static caching causes Statamic to write full page HTML to disk on the first request, and subsequent requests are served as static files — no PHP, no database. Add a CDN in front of that, and pages are served from edge servers around the world with minimal origin contact.

For asset delivery specifically, Statamic’s asset containers can be configured to use cloud storage like Amazon S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces, which pairs naturally with a CDN. Images and files in S3 can be served through CloudFront or BunnyCDN, offloading binary asset delivery from your application server entirely.

One consideration when using a CDN with Statamic: cache invalidation. When you publish new content or update an entry, the CDN needs to know to invalidate cached copies of affected pages. Statamic’s static caching system has hooks for this, and some CDN addons automate the purging process. See Statamic Hosting for more on hosting configurations that work well with CDNs.