How to set up Google Cloud CDN for WordPress and benefits

If you care about your blog, website or online business, then you should look for ways to optimize it for growth.

One way to optimize your site for growth is to optimize your site for speed. A fast website has lots of benefits. I will show you how to set up Google Cloud CDN for WordPress, which can unlock more speed. Make your site faster and grow your SEO.

A fast website will improve your SEO and lead to more traffic from Google and other search engines. Google has confirmed that speed is a ranking factor. So, if you want more traffic from Google, then optimize your site for speed.

If you have tried all you can to make your site fast and you are still not successful, one of the things you should do is using a CDN.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) will make many copies of your website, store them in different locations around the world, and serve it to your users as soon as they try to visit your site. This will make your site faster and improve SEO.

The best CDN today is Google Cloud CDN.

What is Google Cloud CDN?

Google Cloud CDN is a Content Delivery Network owned by Google and making use of Google Cloud network. With over 130 locations around the world and leveraging on Google Cloud infrastructure, Google Cloud CDN is among the fastest Content Delivery Network.

The goal of Google Cloud CDN is to make websites faster by leveraging on Google’s infrastructure around the world to serve websites from over 130 locations to users.

What this means is that, if you are using Google Gloud CDN, Google will make copies of your website and store them in over 130 locations around the world. Whenever a user or customer visits your site, it will be served to them from the closest location. This will make your website very fast.

Benefits of using Google Cloud CDN for WordPress

There are many benefits of using Google Cloud CDN:

• Your website will load faster than ever before. Google Cloud is the fastest CDN and this will have a positive impact on your site’s speed.
• SEO will improve. Because your website is fast, this will directly affect your search engine ranking. Meaning you will more traffic with time.
• Your users will be happier. Who does not like a faster website?
• You will make more money. Yes, speed directly affect conversion. Amazon said they lose $1.6 billion every year for every second slower their site loads.
• Bounce rate will go down. A slow website leads to higher bounce rate. Users are impatient. If your site takes too long to load, they will abandon it.
• Your users around the world will access your site fast no matter their location. This is because Google is present in almost every part of the world. Over 130 locations.
• You will have the same network and performance that Google products including YouTube, Gmail and Google search have by using Google Cloud CDN.

Key features of Google Cloud CDN

Here are some Key features of Google Cloud CDN:

• Google premium network
• HTTP/2
• HTTPS
• Global Anycast IP
• IPV6 support
• Global Scale (over 130 locations)
• Logging
• Used by big names including: YouTube, Gmail, Google search and more

Getting ready

There are few things to know.

If you are not hosting your site with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you will be unable to use Google Cloud CDN. This is because Google Cloud CDN only works with Google load balancer and cloud storage origins.

Setting up WordPress on Google Cloud requires some technical knowledge. But there is an easy option that requires no effort.

If you are not technical enough to run WordPress on Google Cloud, there is a simple way to use Google Cloud CDN on WordPress without doing anything at all. I will explain.

How to set up Google Cloud CDN for WordPress

There are two methods to set up Google Cloud CDN for WordPress. Method one is to use a Google Cloud managed WordPress hosting that is using Google Cloud CDN. This method is suitable for those without technical knowledge or for those who do not want to worry about the long process of configuring GCP. This is the best method, and it is the one I have used.

The second method is to install WordPress on Google Cloud Platform. Then you can easily turn on Google Cloud CDN via Load balancer.

Method one: Use a managed Google Cloud WordPress hosting

The easiest and fastest way to use Google Cloud CDN for WordPress is to use a Managed Google Cloud WordPress hosting service that is making use of Google Cloud CDN.

The benefit of this method is that you do not need to do anything. Everything is set up and optimized for you. You just activate and that is all.

The best Managed Google Cloud WordPress hosting services that offer Google Cloud CDN is Templ. Templ is one of the fastest web hosting company. When migrating to Templ, they offer free migration and also offer free speed optimization. They will dispatch their expert to optimize your site. And they use Google Cloud CDN. All you have to do is sign up for their plan. They handle migration and everything. You can read my Templ review.

Another Managed Google Cloud WordPress hosting that offers Google Cloud CDN is Closte. But the problem with Closte is their support. They do not have a live chat and the response time to support is long. If you have issues, it might take long to get support. And from my experience, their reply is always brief. They expect everyone to be a pro.

Method 2: Activate Google Cloud CDN on Google Cloud Platform

For this method, you need to already have your site running on Google Cloud Platform. Then follow these steps.

• Login to Google Cloud platform (GCP)
• Under Network services select Cloud CDN
• Click on Add origin
• Next, just select the load balancer from origin drop-down and click add
• At this point you will see the new CDN created.

If you need help creating load balancer, then follow this guide

At this point your site should be faster. You can use any speed testing tool to check.

Google Cloud CDN vs Cloudflare vs AWS CloudFront vs Microsoft Azure

To test how Google Cloud CDN performs against competitors, I will be testing with CDNperf.

Based on the result above, Google Cloud CDN is the fastest among all the popular competitors.

The query time of Google Cloud CDN is 66.40ms, Cloudflare CDN is 77.17ms, Amazon AWS CloudFront CDN is 71.80ms and Microsoft Azure is 71.00ms.

CDN	Query Speed
Google Cloud CDN	66.40 ms
Microsoft Azure CDN	71.00 ms
Akamai CDN	71.30 ms
AWS CloudFront CDN	71.80 ms
Verizon (Edgecast) CDN	72.60 ms
Cloudflare CDN	77.17 ms
Fastly CDN	77.50 ms
BunnyCDN	86.09 ms
CDN77	87.09 ms
StackPath CDN	88.08 ms
KeyCDN	93.36 ms

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)