WordPress CDN Plugin : Evaluating Few Rotten Eggs

WordPress CDN Plugin is an important part for speeding up WordPress, but unfortunately there is no single well developed standalone CDN Plugin is available. It is true that if we can install W3 Total Cache Plugin and we can forget about everything including searching for some standalone WordPress CDN Plugin, but in few WordPress installation one might need a separate WordPress CDN Plugin or if someone is using other cache plugin like WP Supercache, then a standalone WordPress CDN Plugin will be required.

All currently available WordPress CDN Plugin (s) are worse and can be nightmare for a new user. The rough guide to the problems might help you to find out whether the WordPress CDN Plugin is creating an unrelated problem. In other words, its more about troubleshooting with WordPress CDN Plugin things than finding a better WordPress CDN Plugin.

Some currently available WordPress CDN Plugin

CDN Sync Tool : It was not bad WordPress CDN Plugin, the ‘developer’ however wanted to to something new and ultimately this WordPress CDN Plugin is of no use now. You might be thinking to use the older version – come on – the old version can erase out some meta data from your WP output (the post or page visitor will read). So to work with the good old version of this WordPress CDN Plugin, you have to null it yourself. It has some extra php files which has no GUI control (like setting expire header of Rackspace Cloud files, the PHP file is from GitHub).

CDN Tools : Your WordPress Editor might not load if you are using this WordPress CDN Plugin with Cloud Files. The probable reason is, it uses old API (php file) and Akamai in current version do not allow certain calls.

CloudFlare : Itself its quite good but only for CloudFlare.

WordPress CDN Rewrite : Painful WordPress CDN Plugin.

Other WordPress CDN Plugin (s) are worser.

Solution and alternatives to Wordpress CDN Plugin

Our target is to minify and upload to CDN – this is the minimum expectation from a standalone WordPress CDN Plugin. So you can :

• Use the absolute urls of CDN in Theme files
• Use htaccess redirection after manual loading of static files to CDN
• Probably the best option is not to fight with these any WordPress CDN Plugin but to install W3 Total Cache.

The re-birth of  CDN Sync Tool (Read death of a good Wordpress CDN Plugin) practically has rendered WP Super Cache useless to an advanced user. We are still using WP Super Cache as it had some flexibility we needed manual php editing for our complex platform, but without any good WordPress CDN Plugin that suits nicely with it (or alone), the option becomes only W3 Total Cache.