CDN is a must add feature if you want to have a website that is faster to load. Today, most WordPress hosting services offer CDN as their built-in feature. However, not all of them are transparent enough about the feature. WP Engine, for instance. It doesn’t disclose the CDN capacity on your plan. Also, it offers no tool to monitor the CDN usage. You can’t even control the feature (enable or disable).
With all the above facts, if your web hosting adopts the same practice, you might be wondering, how to know if CDN has been implemented to your website? This post will show you how.
There are at least two ways to figure out if CDN has been implemented on your website. But first, you may need to know the popular CDN services below, especially if you want to use the manual method which we will cover shortly. Here are the most popular CDN services:
- Akamai
- Amazon CloudFront
- bunny.net
- CacheFly
- CDN77
- Cloudflare
- Fastly
- Gcore
- Medianova
- StackPath
2 Ways to Check If CDN Has Been Implemented to Your Website
Method 1: Using an Online Tool
This is an easier way to check if CDN has been implemented on your website. You can use CDN Finder from CDN Planet. First, visit the CDN Finder page and enter your website URL to the available field. Click the Run CDN Finder button.
Wait a moment until the tool is done checking your website. Once done, check the output. If it finds CDN on your website, it will be showed on the CDN column.
If your website has no CDN, you will see the following output on the CDN column.
Method 2: Manually
This method takes more effort than the method above. But, if you prefer the manual way, follow the steps below.
First, launch the command line app on your computer (e.g., Terminal on Mac and Command Prompt on Windows). Run the ping command to figure out the IP address of your website.
On the example above, the IP address is 162.159.135.42.
Next, run the whois command to figure out the necessary information about your website. You can run it by typing whois followed by your website IP address on the terminal app. Or you can use who.is if you are a Windows user as Windows has no built-in whois tool.
On the generated output, take a look at the IP address range line.
As you can see on the screenshot above, the IP address range — where the IP address of the tested site on — belongs to Cloudflare (take a look at the organization line). Meaning the site uses Cloudflare, a popular CDN service used by hosting services like Kinsta, Rocket.net, to WP Engine.
The Bottom Line
CDN is a common feature offered by managed WordPress hosting. Especially WordPress hosting services like Kinsta, Rocket.net, WP Engine, to Pressable. However, not all hosting services allow you to control the feature yourself or monitor the CDN usage. WP Engine, for instance.
Although it has a built-in CDN feature (powered by Cloudflare), you have no option to disable it or monitor the usage. These facts have raised a question in the users’ mind whether CDN has been implemented to their websites.
If you have the same question — regardless of where your websites are hosted — you can use the two methods we have just covered above to check if CDN has been implemented to your website.
