CDN URL rewriting plugin for WordPress

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To make sure the MailChimp for WordPress site loads as fast as possible throughout the world we recently started using Amazon Cloudfront, a Content Delivery Network, for serving all public assets (CSS, JavaScript and image files).

Configuring WordPress to use a CDN seemed like a straightforward and simple enough process to me. Looking at the available plugins however, nothing really seemed to work in the way I expected it to.

I was looking for something lightweight that only replaced certain URL’s on the public section of a WordPress site, but everything I found did way more than that, was poorly coded or simply broken. That’s why I decided to write my own little CDN plugin for WordPress.

WordPress CDN Loader, a microplugin.

In the last few months, I’ve been creating more and more #microplugins which do one thing and do it well. Since others might benefit from a simple CDN URL rewriter as well, I made the CDN Loader plugin for WordPress publicly available on GitHub.

We’re using it ourself with Amazon Cloudfront (which is free for low-bandwidth sites) but you can configure it with any CDN service. Configuring the plugin is very straightforward, although the plugin does not come with a dedicated settings page as I figured that would be overkill for the one setting it actually requires: your CDN url.

Installing the CDN Loader

To use the plugin on your own site, take the following steps.

  1. First, install the plugin from GitHub: dannyvankooten/wp-cdn-loader
  2. Configure your CDN url in wp-config.php by defining the following PHP constant.
define( 'DVK_CDN_URL', '//xxxxxx.cloudfront.net' );

That’s all there is to it - you’re all set now!

I hope you enjoy the lightweight solution, we’ve been using it on mc4wp.com for a few months now, it works great!