Media CDN
Media CDN mirrors the images your app requests most — avatars and album photos — and serves them from an edge network rather than from your WordPress host.
What it changes
Section titled “What it changes”A member directory is dozens of avatars on one screen. Every one is a request to your origin, and origins are usually the slowest thing in the chain.
Mirrored, those images come from a location near the member instead. The screen that benefits most is the one with the most faces on it: the directory, followers, group members, and search results.
What it mirrors
Section titled “What it mirrors”Local WordPress avatars and uploaded photos.
Gravatar is left alone. A Gravatar URL already points at a CDN, and putting a second one in front of it adds a hop without removing one.
Setting it up
Section titled “Setting it up”- Choose a plan at Media CDN in the builder.
- Authorise your site — see Authorising a site.
- Images begin mirroring on first request. There is no bulk import step and no waiting for a sync.
Mirroring is lazy: the first request for an image fetches it from your origin and stores it, and subsequent requests are served from the edge. So the benefit appears over the first days of use rather than immediately.
Connecting a site to Media CDN
record → src/assets/media/media-cdn-setup.mp4
Quotas
Section titled “Quotas”Storage is pooled per user across your account rather than fixed per site, so one busy community and one quiet one share the allowance instead of each holding capacity it does not need.
Your usage is shown on the Media CDN screen. Exceeding the quota stops new images being mirrored; it does not break image loading, because the app falls back to your origin.
That fallback is worth remembering: the failure mode is slow, not broken.
Domains
Section titled “Domains”Media is served from a pre-registered domain. Pointing a domain of your own at the service is part of the setup rather than something you configure afterwards — ask before you plan around a specific hostname.
When it does not work
Section titled “When it does not work”| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Images look no faster | Nothing has been mirrored yet | Mirroring is lazy; check again after normal use |
| Some avatars are not mirrored | They are Gravatars | Expected — Gravatar is already a CDN |
| Mirroring stopped | The quota is reached | Check usage on the Media CDN screen |
| Images broke entirely | Not caused by the CDN, which falls back to origin | Check the images load on your site directly |
| The site will not authorise | The handshake was not completed | Authorising a site |