Yes. The question worth more of your time is whether you already have one. Two of the platforms named on this page put a CDN on their free plan and charge nothing for it. Find out what your account already includes before anyone sells you an upgrade.
What a CDN actually does
Your website lives on one server, in one building, in one city. Without a CDN, every visitor pulls every photo, every stylesheet, and every page from that one machine.
A content delivery network keeps copies of your files on machines in many cities. A customer in Tampa gets served from something nearby instead of from a box in Oregon.
Google’s developer site, web.dev, publishes a page called “Optimize Time to First Byte,” published January 19, 2023 and last updated November 28, 2025. It says: “CDNs solve the problem of user proximity from your origin server by using a distributed network of servers that cache resources on servers that are physically closer to your users.”
That same page is careful about the effort. It says adopting a CDN “involves a varying amount of effort from trivial to significant,” and that it should be a high priority “if your website is not already using one.” Which brings up the obvious question nobody asks first.
Check whether you already have one
Two large platforms publish the answer in their own documentation, and neither puts it on the invoice as a separate line.
Squarespace’s help center has a page called “Where does Squarespace store my data?”, last updated May 4, 2023. It says: “We serve images and other static assets via multiple geographically distributed content delivery networks (CDNs).”
Netlify’s pricing page lists “Global CDN” among the features of its Free plan, and prices that plan at $0. The next tier up, Personal, is $9 a month. That page carries no update date.
Two published examples is not the whole market, so do not assume yours matches. Ask your own host the question before you pay anyone for a CDN.
The free tier is usually the whole answer
Cloudflare publishes a plan comparison, which makes it easy to read for yourself. That page prices the Free plan at $0 a month and lists “CDN,” “Universal SSL Certificate,” “Unmetered DDoS Protection,” and “Fast, Easy-to-use DNS” among the features it includes. That page carries no update date.
The same page prices the next tier, Pro, at $20 a month billed annually, or $25 a month billed monthly. Business is $200 a month billed annually, or $250 a month billed monthly.
It also shows what the extra money buys. Set against the Free plan, Pro adds lossless image optimization, a larger rule allowance of 225 rules against 70, and support by ticket rather than the community forum. Look at that list and ask which line you would actually use this year on a five page site selling drain clearing.
Cloudflare’s separate free plan page sells add-ons on top of the plan. Load Balancing is listed as “Starting at $5 per month,” and so is Smart Shield with Argo Smart Routing. That page carries no update date.
Cloudflare’s network page says “95% of the world’s Internet-connected population is within 50 milliseconds of a Cloudflare data center.” That page carries no update date either.
Here is the limit on that figure. It is Cloudflare’s number, about Cloudflare’s own network, with no independent measurement published beside it. It is a claim, not a test you can repeat. Treat it that way.
What it will not cache, and why that matters
This is the part that catches people out, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.
Cloudflare’s developer documentation has a page called “Default cache behavior,” last updated August 14, 2026. It says: “The Cloudflare CDN does not cache HTML or JSON by default.” It caches by file extension rather than by content type, and the default list is images, stylesheets, scripts, fonts, PDFs, video, and compressed archives.
Read that twice if you run WordPress. Switching Cloudflare on in front of a WordPress site speeds up your job photos. The page itself is still built fresh by your host on every single visit. If your host is slow, it stays slow, and the CDN is not the thing that will fix it.
The same page points you at cache rules to cache more than the default list. Most people never write one, then wonder why the site feels about the same as it did last month.
A site made of finished files is a different case. There is nothing left to build, so the whole page can sit out at the edge. That trade has real limits worth understanding before you pick it, and they are laid out in what a static site cannot do.
What a CDN will not fix
A CDN moves your files closer to people. It does not make them smaller.
Google’s web.dev page on Largest Contentful Paint, published August 8, 2019 and last updated September 4, 2025, says sites “should strive to have Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less,” and that a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads. If your homepage carries a 6 MB photo of a truck and four tracking scripts, a CDN hands all of that over faster, from nearer. It is still 6 MB. Fix the weight first.
A CDN is also not uptime. If your own host falls over, a visitor asking for an uncached page still gets nothing back. Before you treat the network as insurance, it is worth knowing what a 99.9% uptime promise really covers.
And it will not lift you in local search on its own. Nothing here changes who Google names for “plumber near me.”
What to do next
Five plain steps, in order.
- Ask your host or your web person one question. Is my site behind a CDN, and is the page itself cached or built fresh on every visit? A straight answer fits in one sentence.
- If the answer is no CDN at all, start with a free tier. Both plan pages named above list one at no cost.
- If you already pay for a CDN plan, open the plan comparison and read what the money buys. If it is image tools you have never opened, step back down a tier.
- Before you spend anything on the network, weigh your pages. Run your own address through Google PageSpeed Insights and find the largest image on the page. A CDN moves those bytes faster. It does not remove them.
- If you are collecting quotes for a new website build, ask which pages get cached at the edge and which get built fresh for every visitor. A vague answer tells you something.
The honest bottom line for a local trade: a CDN is a box that should already be ticked, and it should not cost you extra. If someone is selling one to you as an upgrade, find out what your host includes before you sign anything.