The CDN Decision I Got Completely Wrong the First Time

Picked my first CDN because it was the name everyone recognized, the one that came up first in every hosting recommendation article I'd read. Seemed like the safe, obvious choice at the time.
Site barely got faster after setting it up. Genuinely confused for a while, since everything I'd read suggested this particular CDN should have made a noticeable difference. Turned out, after actually digging into it, there were no server nodes anywhere particularly near my actual visitors, who were concentrated in a specific region this particular CDN just wasn't well positioned to serve efficiently.
Switched to a smaller, far less recognizable provider after doing more research, one with nodes exactly where my traffic was actually coming from. Load times dropped noticeably within days, same content, same hosting setup underneath, just infrastructure that was genuinely positioned for my specific audience instead of a generic global footprint that didn't match my reality.
The cache hit ratio difference surprised me too. First CDN had impressive sounding speed numbers plastered across its marketing pages, but a significant chunk of requests were still hitting my origin server because content wasn't actually staying properly cached. Second one had a noticeably higher cache hit ratio in day to day practice, which mattered far more than any headline number ever did.
WordPress integration made an everyday difference as well. First setup meant manually clearing cache every single time I updated a post, something I forgot more often than I should admit, which meant visitors occasionally saw stale content without me realizing. Second one purged cache automatically the moment I hit publish, removing that entire mental overhead.
If you're choosing a CDN now, check where the actual nodes are relative to your audience before anything else: Best CDN for WordPress
https://digiadgalla.com/best-cdn-for-wordpress/