Cloudflare vs BunnyCDN vs CloudFront: Best CDN Choice for WordPress and WooCommerce

When you start pushing WordPress or WooCommerce beyond a simple brochure site, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) quickly stops being a “nice extra” and becomes part of the core stack. Page builders, big images, dynamic cart fragments, and countless plugins all add weight. A CDN does not magically fix a slow origin server, but it is one of the most effective ways to reduce global latency, offload traffic, and protect your store from abusive bots and DDoS. In this article, we will compare three of the most popular options WordPress users consider: Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, and CloudFront. We will look at them from a practical hosting point of view: real-world performance, ease of use, pricing behaviour, and how well they play with typical WordPress and WooCommerce setups on our infrastructure at dchost.com. By the end, you should have a clear, no-drama checklist to pick the right CDN for your current project and a path to switch later if your needs change.

Why a CDN Matters So Much for WordPress and Especially WooCommerce

Before choosing between Cloudflare, BunnyCDN and CloudFront, it helps to be clear on what problem you are actually trying to solve. For most WordPress and WooCommerce sites, a CDN delivers value in four main areas:

• Lower latency: Serving images, CSS, JS and even HTML from an edge location closer to your visitors cuts round-trip times and improves TTFB.
• Offloading origin traffic: Your web server (on shared hosting, VPS or dedicated) can focus on generating dynamic pages instead of serving every static asset over and over.
• Improved stability under traffic spikes: Marketing campaigns, seasonal sales and viral posts become less risky when cached pages and assets are served from many edge nodes.
• Extra security and resilience: A CDN can absorb or mitigate DDoS attacks, filter bad bots and reduce the attack surface of your origin.

We dive deeper into origin performance and its impact on metrics like TTFB and LCP in our article on Core Web Vitals and hosting-side optimisations. The key idea: a CDN amplifies a good origin but cannot fully hide a slow or unstable one. That is why we always recommend pairing any CDN with an appropriately sized hosting plan (shared, VPS or dedicated) based on your expected WooCommerce traffic, as described in our WooCommerce capacity planning guide.

Quick Overview: Cloudflare vs BunnyCDN vs CloudFront

Cloudflare in a Nutshell

Cloudflare is best known as a reverse-proxy CDN and security platform. You usually point your domain’s nameservers to Cloudflare, and all HTTP(S) traffic is proxied through their network. Key characteristics:

• Full-proxy architecture: Handles DNS, CDN, WAF, DDoS protection and various edge features in one place.
• Free entry tier: Very attractive for small sites and testing, with paid tiers for more control and features.
• Powerful rules engine: Page Rules and Transform Rules offer fine-grained caching and routing behaviour.
• Good fit for security-focused setups: Bot protection, WAF, rate limiting and zero-trust tools for admins and APIs.

If you want a single control plane for DNS, CDN and basic WAF, Cloudflare is often the first thing people try. We already covered DNS decisions in detail in our article Cloudflare DNS vs hosting DNS and how to choose a nameserver strategy; the same architectural thinking applies when you add CDN features on top.

BunnyCDN in a Nutshell

BunnyCDN is a pull-based CDN that focuses heavily on simplicity, transparent pricing and performance. You usually keep DNS where it is and just point static assets (or the whole site via CNAME) at Bunny’s hostname. Key characteristics:

• Pay-as-you-go pricing by traffic with region-based rates, usually easy to predict and control.
• Pull zones that fetch content from your origin and cache it at edge PoPs.
• Optional storage and image optimisation features to reduce origin load and bandwidth.
• Simple dashboard and straightforward integration with most WordPress CDN plugins.

BunnyCDN is attractive if you want a classic CDN model with clear per-GB pricing, minimal lock-in and easy debugging.

CloudFront in a Nutshell

CloudFront is a global CDN service oriented towards large-scale, multi-region and API-heavy workloads as well as traditional websites. It is especially common in environments that are already using advanced cloud-native tooling. Key characteristics:

• Highly configurable cache behaviour per path, header, query string and cookie.
• Deep feature set for enterprises, including signed URLs, private content and granular security controls.
• Integration with object storage and serverless runtimes for complex architectures.
• Pricing structure more complex, with multiple dimensions (traffic, requests, invalidations, etc.).

CloudFront can be excellent for WordPress and WooCommerce, but its strengths are most visible when you already operate in a highly automated, infrastructure-as-code environment and are comfortable managing more knobs and levers.

Key Criteria When Choosing a CDN for WordPress and WooCommerce

Rather than asking “Which CDN is the best?”, it is more useful to rank Cloudflare, BunnyCDN and CloudFront against the criteria that actually matter for your WordPress site or WooCommerce store. Based on what we see in real-world projects on our hosting platform, these are the big ones:

• Global performance and cache hit ratio
• Caching rules that operate nicely with dynamic WooCommerce pages
• Ease of integration with common WordPress plugins
• Security features and DDoS/bot protection
• Pricing model and cost predictability
• Operational complexity (who will manage it day-to-day?)

Let us walk through these one by one and see how each provider behaves for typical scenarios.

Performance and Caching Behaviour

Edge Locations and Latency

All three CDNs operate global edge networks with many PoPs, so the raw number of locations is less important than it used to be. What matters more is:

• Where your customers are (regions and ISPs).
• How good their peering is with those ISPs.
• How aggressively you cache HTML, assets and APIs.

Cloudflare typically has very strong coverage for mixed global audiences and does a good job peering close to consumer ISPs. BunnyCDN is also strong and allows you to choose which regions to enable, which can be very helpful to control costs if you know your traffic is mostly from Europe or North America. CloudFront offers extensive global coverage as well, but you feel its strengths most in large distributed architectures.

Regardless of CDN, remember that origin TTFB still matters. If PHP and MySQL on your origin are slow, the CDN will only hide it for cache hits. On misses (first requests, logged-in users, carts), visitors still pay the full cost. Our guide on server-side WordPress optimisation with PHP-FPM, OPcache, Redis and MySQL tuning shows how to prepare your dchost.com VPS or dedicated server so the CDN has a fast, stable origin to work with.

Static Assets vs HTML Caching

For WordPress and WooCommerce, we usually separate caching into:

• Static assets: images, CSS, JS, fonts, product thumbnails.
• HTML pages: category pages, product pages, blog posts, landing pages.

All three CDNs cache static assets easily. The real differentiation comes from HTML caching rules, especially when WooCommerce is involved (cart, checkout, account pages, personalised pricing).

• Cloudflare: can cache HTML via Page Rules or Cache Rules, but you must carefully exclude WooCommerce-sensitive URLs and cookies. With the right configuration, it can significantly reduce PHP load at the origin.
• BunnyCDN: caches HTML if you set appropriate Cache-Control headers or use their rules engine. Integration is usually done via a caching plugin that knows which paths to bypass.
• CloudFront: supports highly advanced cache behaviours based on path, headers, cookies and query strings. Excellent for complex setups, but can feel heavy for a simple WooCommerce shop if you are not used to that level of configuration.

If you are new to HTML caching at the edge, it is worth reading our detailed article on CDN caching for WordPress and WooCommerce with Cache-Control and edge rules. The same principles apply regardless of whether the edge network is Cloudflare, BunnyCDN or CloudFront: get your Cache-Control headers right, be precise about which paths are cacheable, and protect dynamic endpoints from being cached accidentally.

WooCommerce-Specific Gotchas

WooCommerce introduces a few moving parts that can break easily if HTML caching is too aggressive:

• Cart fragments and mini-cart widgets.
• Checkout and payment callbacks.
• Account pages and personalised discounts.

For most stores, we recommend a pattern similar to the one in our guide on CDN caching rules for WordPress and safe WooCommerce HTML bypass:

• Cache category pages, product pages and blog posts aggressively for guests.
• Bypass cache for users with a WooCommerce session cookie or logged-in cookies.
• Exclude /cart/, /checkout/, /my-account/ and payment webhook URLs from HTML caching.

Cloudflare and CloudFront can both implement cookie-sensitive rules; BunnyCDN can do similar things using its rules engine combined with plugin-side logic. The main question is not “Can it be done?” but “How comfortable are you managing that complexity?”

Ease of Use and Integration with WordPress

DNS and Onboarding Flow

The initial setup experience differs quite a bit:

• Cloudflare: You usually move your domain’s nameservers to Cloudflare so they can be a full reverse-proxy. This gives you DNS-level control, WAF and CDN in one place, but also means Cloudflare is now a critical piece of your DNS infrastructure.
• BunnyCDN: You typically keep DNS where it is (for example, with dchost.com or your preferred registrar/hosting) and add a CNAME pointing to Bunny’s hostname. It feels like a smaller change, especially for teams that prefer to keep DNS closer to their hosting environment.
• CloudFront: Similar to BunnyCDN in that you often create a CNAME from cdn.example.com to a CloudFront distribution. However, the configuration screen is more complex, with many options that can intimidate new users.

If you are not sure whether you want DNS and CDN combined or separate, our article on choosing between Cloudflare DNS and hosting DNS offers a good mental model. Many dchost.com customers start with DNS on our side and a simple CNAME-based CDN like Bunny for static assets, then later move DNS to Cloudflare if they need advanced security features.

WordPress Plugins and Automation

For WordPress administrators, everyday usability often comes down to plugin support:

• Cloudflare has an official WordPress plugin that can purge cache on content updates, adjust some settings and integrate with APO (Automatic Platform Optimization) on compatible plans.
• BunnyCDN is supported by several third-party plugins that handle URL rewriting for static assets, cache purging and pull-zone management. The dashboard itself is quite straightforward.
• CloudFront usually relies on generic CDN plugins that support custom CNAMEs, or on custom automation via CI/CD and APIs. It is powerful, but you are more likely to involve a DevOps flow than just clicking around in the WordPress admin.

For smaller teams that manage sites directly from the WordPress dashboard, Cloudflare and BunnyCDN tend to feel more approachable. For teams already using infrastructure-as-code and deployment pipelines to a VPS or dedicated server, CloudFront’s flexibility might be worth the extra effort.

Debugging Cache Issues

At some point, you will face questions like “Why do I still see the old CSS?” or “Why is the cart not updating?”. How easy it is to debug depends on the tools and feedback each CDN gives you:

• Cloudflare: Response headers, analytics and dev tools support help you see cache status and rule matches. Page Rules and Cache Rules are powerful, but sometimes overlap in confusing ways if not documented clearly.
• BunnyCDN: Usually easier to reason about because it acts like a more traditional pull CDN; fewer moving parts mean fewer surprise interactions.
• CloudFront: Very powerful cache behaviour logic, but understanding which behaviour applies and why a certain header or cookie was included sometimes requires more experience with the platform.

For many WooCommerce stores, the trade-off is between power and mental overhead. If your team prefers a simpler mental model, BunnyCDN or a carefully configured Cloudflare setup will probably feel more comfortable than a very granular CloudFront configuration.

Security, DDoS Protection and Bot Control

CDNs are no longer just about speed; they are part of your security perimeter. For WordPress and WooCommerce, this matters both for uptime and for keeping brute-force and card testing bots under control.

Cloudflare: Strong All-in-One Security Layer

Cloudflare is particularly strong in the security department:

• Layer 3/4 DDoS mitigation for large volumetric attacks.
• Application-layer WAF with managed rulesets and custom rules.
• Bot management and rate limiting that integrate directly with the reverse-proxy layer.
• Access / zero-trust tools to protect admin panels and private areas.

We have a dedicated article on using Cloudflare WAF and rate limiting to protect WordPress from bots, and those same techniques work well for WooCommerce checkouts and login forms. Combined with server-side protections on your dchost.com VPS or dedicated server (such as Fail2ban and ModSecurity), you can build a layered defence that remains manageable.

BunnyCDN: Solid, Focused on CDN Layer

BunnyCDN offers basic security features suitable for many WordPress sites:

• Basic DDoS protection at the edge.
• Geo-blocking and IP blocking features.
• Token authentication and hotlink protection.
• HTTPS by default with modern TLS.

It does not try to replace a full-featured WAF layer. Instead, you would typically combine BunnyCDN with server-side WAF and security hardening on your hosting. On our side, we often pair BunnyCDN with tuned ModSecurity rules and Fail2ban, as explained in the article how to tune ModSecurity + OWASP CRS for fewer false positives.

CloudFront: Enterprise-Grade but Heavier to Drive

CloudFront exposes rich security controls and integrates with powerful WAF and shielding layers. This is great for complex, high-risk environments, but requires more configuration effort and a deeper understanding of HTTP, TLS and threat models. For many standard WordPress and WooCommerce sites, this level of control is not strictly necessary, though it may be valuable if you are consolidating multiple applications behind a single global CDN strategy.

Pricing Models and Cost Predictability

Performance and security are important, but for many site owners the crucial question is: what will this cost me each month, and is it predictable?

Cloudflare Pricing Behaviour

Cloudflare’s free plan is attractive for smaller sites, especially content-focused WordPress blogs or early-stage stores. As traffic grows or you need more advanced WAF/bot features, you move into paid tiers. The main advantage is that the entry barrier is low; you can reasonably test Cloudflare without an immediate budget impact.

However, because Cloudflare bundles many features together, you may find yourself upgrading not just for bandwidth but for extra rules or security controls. It is important to periodically review which rules and features you actually use, so you are not paying for options that are irrelevant to your current stack.

BunnyCDN Pricing Behaviour

BunnyCDN uses a very transparent per-GB pricing model by region. You pay for the data your visitors actually pull from the cache. This is often easier to align with business metrics (page views, campaigns, seasonal peaks) and can be very cost-effective for WooCommerce stores with heavy image traffic, especially if you enable HTML caching for guests.

The main watchpoint is cache hit ratio: if your rules or plugins cause too many cache misses, you will send more traffic back to your origin and pay more in both CDN and origin bandwidth. That is why we emphasise good Cache-Control hygiene in our CDN-focused guides.

CloudFront Pricing Behaviour

CloudFront’s pricing is more complex, with costs depending on traffic volume, number of requests and operations like invalidations. It is very powerful for large or multi-application deployments, where fine-grained control lets you optimise cost per use case. For a single WooCommerce store or a handful of WordPress sites, however, the pricing model requires closer monitoring and forecasting.

Whichever CDN you choose, you should align it with your overall hosting cost optimisation strategy. We explore this in detail in our article on cutting hosting costs by right-sizing VPS, bandwidth and storage. The goal is a balanced stack: a sensibly sized VPS or dedicated server at dchost.com, paired with CDN caching that maximises cache hits without breaking dynamic features.

Which CDN Fits Which WordPress / WooCommerce Scenario?

Instead of trying to crown a universal winner, it is more useful to match each CDN to typical project profiles we see.

1. Small to Medium WordPress Site, Primarily Content

Profile: Blog, company site, landing pages, light WooCommerce or no e-commerce yet. Traffic is modest but growing; you host the site on shared hosting or a small VPS at dchost.com.

• Cloudflare: Great starting point thanks to the free plan and simple onboarding. Static assets caching plus basic WAF is often enough.
• BunnyCDN: Also an excellent choice if you prefer to keep DNS with your hosting and want very transparent per-GB pricing from day one.
• CloudFront: Typically overkill unless you already integrate with other advanced cloud tooling.

2. Growing WooCommerce Store with Regional Audience

Profile: Revenue-bearing WooCommerce store, traffic concentrated in one or two regions (for example, Europe + Middle East), hosted on a well-sized NVMe VPS or dedicated server at dchost.com. You want fast product/category pages, but checkout stability matters more than exotic edge features.

• BunnyCDN: Very strong candidate due to cost-effective regional pricing and simple cache rules. Pair it with a well-tuned caching plugin and explicit HTML cache bypass for carts and checkout.
• Cloudflare: Also a good option, especially if you need stronger WAF and bot protection at the edge.
• CloudFront: Useful if your shop is part of a bigger, multi-application architecture that already uses it; otherwise, likely more complexity than you need.

3. High-Traffic, Globally Distributed WooCommerce or Membership Site

Profile: Multiple regions, frequent campaigns, heavy peaks, and possibly custom apps (APIs, SPAs) sharing the same origin. You may have separate database and cache servers, as we explain in our guide on when WooCommerce needs separate database and cache servers.

• Cloudflare: Excellent if you want a strong security perimeter, global WAF rules and custom edge logic.
• BunnyCDN: Can still work very well, especially with region-aware configuration, but you might supplement it with stronger server-side WAF and bot controls.
• CloudFront: Becomes attractive if you run multiple microservices, APIs and media-heavy applications and want a single, deeply configurable CDN layer across them.

4. Multi-Site WordPress Networks and SaaS on WordPress

Profile: WordPress Multisite or SaaS-like platforms built on top of WordPress, often hosted on a dedicated server or multi-VPS cluster at dchost.com. Complex routing, custom domains, staging environments and a strong need for automation.

• Cloudflare: Works well when combined with API-driven DNS and caching rules. Good fit if you use Cloudflare Workers or similar edge logic.
• BunnyCDN: Good choice for offloading media and static assets across many sites with minimal fuss.
• CloudFront: A serious candidate when everything else is automated and infrastructure-as-code is standard in your workflow.

Practical Setup Tips with dchost.com Hosting

Whichever CDN you choose, the origin side needs to be clean, stable and predictable. Some practical tips we routinely apply for our customers on dchost.com VPS, dedicated and colocation setups:

• Use HTTPS everywhere: Terminate TLS on the CDN, but also serve HTTPS cleanly from the origin. This avoids mixed content issues and enables HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 between client and edge, and often between edge and origin as well.
• Set correct Cache-Control headers on assets and HTML. Let the CDN honour them instead of relying exclusively on per-path rules. This keeps behaviour portable between providers.
• Separate static and dynamic paths as much as possible (for example, serve media from cdn.example.com and keep admin/checkout on www.example.com).
• Optimise PHP-FPM, OPcache and database so that cache misses are still fast. Even the best CDN cannot compensate for a struggling origin.
• Monitor both CDN and origin metrics: cache hit ratio, origin error rate, slow queries and CPU/RAM usage on your hosting.

If you are still deciding between shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting or a VPS as your origin, our article on choosing the best hosting for WordPress (shared vs managed vs VPS) walks through realistic trade-offs. From there, pairing your chosen origin with the right CDN becomes much easier.

Conclusion: How to Decide Between Cloudflare, BunnyCDN and CloudFront

Cloudflare, BunnyCDN and CloudFront can all deliver excellent performance for WordPress and WooCommerce when configured correctly. The real question is not which one is “objectively best”, but which one fits your team, your traffic pattern and your budget today—while leaving room to grow tomorrow.

• Choose Cloudflare if you want a strong all-in-one edge layer for DNS, CDN and security, with powerful WAF and bot controls and you are comfortable moving nameservers.
• Choose BunnyCDN if you prefer a classic, transparent CDN with per-GB pricing, simple mental model and easy integration for regional WooCommerce stores and content-heavy sites.
• Consider CloudFront when you already operate a more complex, automated infrastructure and need deeply customisable cache behaviours across multiple apps and APIs.

From the hosting side, our role at dchost.com is to make sure your origin is ready: the right CPU/RAM and NVMe storage, tuned PHP-FPM and database, secure TLS configuration and realistic capacity planning. Once that foundation is solid, adding or switching between these CDNs becomes a strategic choice rather than an emergency fix.

If you are planning a new WooCommerce launch, a migration from another provider or a major campaign and want to validate your CDN choice against your hosting architecture, feel free to align it with the principles in our guides on CDN caching rules and hosting scaling for high-traffic campaigns. With a clean origin at dchost.com and a well-chosen CDN in front, WordPress and WooCommerce can scale further and more calmly than many people expect.