CDN URL rewriting plugin for WordPress

Published on May 22, 2015

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.

First, install the plugin from GitHub: dannyvankooten/wp-cdn-loader
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!