Hostinger ships a built-in CDN on Business, Cloud, and Agency plans at no extra cost, and most setup guides stop at "open hPanel and click Enable." The real work happens in the next hour: confirming no other CDN is fighting yours for DNS, deciding which LiteSpeed Cache features to keep and which to hand to the CDN, and checking that the edge actually serves your pages instead of every request still hitting your origin server. This guide walks the activation, the cache layer split, and the verification checks in order.
Prerequisites
- A Business, Cloud, or Agency plan. Single and Premium plans do not include the CDN. VPS plans need a third-party CDN like Cloudflare instead.
- Your domain must point to Hostinger nameservers (ns1.dns-parking.com, ns2.dns-parking.com) or to the hosting plan IP via an A record. If you currently route DNS through Cloudflare, plan a brief switchover (covered below).
- If you have a third-party CDN active (Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, KeyCDN), disable it before you turn on Hostinger CDN. Two CDNs in front of one origin will fight over cache state and you will serve stale pages.
- Take a baseline PageSpeed or GTmetrix reading from a location near your audience before you change anything. You will need it to confirm the CDN is helping rather than hiding a problem.
Step 1: Disable Any Third-Party CDN
In your existing CDN dashboard, pause or disable the proxy. For Cloudflare, set every orange-cloud icon to grey-cloud (DNS only) for the relevant domain. Wait five minutes for caches to clear before continuing. If you skip this and DNS is still proxied through Cloudflare, Hostinger CDN activation will fail with a "DNS not pointed to Hostinger" error.
Step 2: Confirm DNS Points to Hostinger
From a terminal, run dig +short A yourdomain.com. The returned IP must match the shared IP listed in hPanel under Websites > Dashboard > General > Details (or the dedicated IP on Cloud plans). If your domain still resolves to a Cloudflare IP (104.x or 172.67.x), the CDN will not activate.
Step 3: Enable the CDN in hPanel
- Log in to hPanel and select your website.
- From the sidebar, choose Performance, then CDN. On Agency plans, CDN is a top-level menu item.
- Click Enable. The page will flip to a Manage view with Analytics, Optimization, Traffic, and Security tabs.
Initial propagation runs 15 to 45 minutes for most domains, with a worst-case window of 24 to 48 hours quoted by Hostinger. If you make changes during this window, use the Flush Cache button on the CDN page instead of waiting.
Step 4: Configure Optimization Settings
Under the Optimization tab, two settings matter:
- WebP conversion is enabled by default and serves WebP versions of JPEG and PNG images to supporting browsers, cutting image weight by roughly 30%. Leave it on.
- Smart image optimization auto-picks width and quality per device. Turn it on for content sites. Skip it for portfolios where you art-direct image quality manually, because the CDN will downsize hero images on mobile in ways your designer did not approve.
Step 5: Set Security Level (and the TLS 1.3 Catch)
Under Security, the level dropdown controls how aggressively the CDN challenges suspicious traffic. Medium is the default and matches most WordPress sites. Switch to High only if you are seeing active bot floods, because High will challenge real visitors using older browsers or VPNs.
Hostinger CDN also offers a TLS 1.3-only toggle. Enabling it drops TLS 1.2, which kills compatibility with Java 7 clients, some older e-commerce point-of-sale browsers, and roughly 1% of mobile devices still on Android 4.x or iOS 11. Leave the default (TLS 1.2 and 1.3 both) unless you have a compliance reason to require 1.3.
Step 6: Verify the CDN Is Actually Serving Your Pages
This is the step most tutorials skip. After propagation, run:
curl -I https://yourdomain.com/In the response headers look for x-cache: HIT (or MISS on the first request), x-hostinger-cache-status, and server: hostinger. If you see only your origin server's headers, DNS has not propagated yet or another proxy is intercepting the request. Repeat from a second location using a tool like KeyCDN's Performance Test before assuming the CDN is live.
Hostinger CDN and LiteSpeed Cache: Avoiding the Cache Collision
Hostinger servers ship with LiteSpeed and the LSCWP plugin preinstalled. Once you turn on Hostinger CDN, you have two cache layers in front of your WordPress install: LSCWP (server-level page cache and CSS/JS optimization) and the CDN edge (full-page cache, image optimization, minification). Leaving both running without changes causes purge mismatches and double-minified assets.
The clean split:
- Keep in LSCWP: page cache, object cache configuration, browser cache headers, database optimization.
- Hand to the CDN: CSS minification, JavaScript minification, HTML minification, image WebP conversion.
- Turn off in LSCWP: the LSCWP CDN settings tab (do not enable a second CDN inside LSCWP), QUIC.cloud image optimization if you are using Hostinger's, and the Page Optimization > CSS/JS Combine options.
After making these changes, purge both caches: LSCWP's "Purge All" button, then Hostinger CDN's "Flush Cache." Test the site logged out in an incognito window before declaring it done.
When Hostinger CDN Is the Wrong Choice
Hostinger operates CDN points of presence in five regions: United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Brazil, and France. If your audience is concentrated in Australia, India, Japan, the Middle East, or Africa, latency from the nearest edge can be 200 to 400 ms higher than Cloudflare's 300+ city network. In that case, switch to Cloudflare's free plan or QUIC.cloud (which serves from 80+ locations and integrates natively with LSCWP) instead of Hostinger's built-in CDN.
Migrating from Cloudflare to Hostinger CDN Without Downtime
The order matters. Do it like this:
- In Cloudflare, set every record for your domain from orange-cloud (proxied) to grey-cloud (DNS only). Wait 10 minutes.
- Confirm
dig +short yourdomain.comreturns your Hostinger IP, not a Cloudflare IP. - In hPanel, enable Hostinger CDN. Confirm activation succeeds.
- Wait until
curl -Ishows Hostinger CDN headers from at least two test locations. - Only then change your domain's nameservers from Cloudflare back to Hostinger (or leave them at Cloudflare with proxying disabled, which works fine).
If you flip the nameservers before disabling proxying, you will hit a 30 to 60 minute window where requests are looped between both services and the site shows 525 SSL errors.
Common Issues and Fixes
- "DNS not pointed to Hostinger" on activation: Cloudflare proxying is still active. Set DNS-only mode and retry.
- Site still slow after CDN is enabled: verify with curl that responses include CDN headers. Slow TTFB after activation usually means the CDN is serving but origin requests for uncached paths (logged-in users, WooCommerce checkout) still run on a slow PHP worker. Tune PHP-FPM workers in hPanel.
- Cached pages serve stale content after updates: purge both LSCWP and the CDN. The CDN's edge cache does not purge automatically when LSCWP rebuilds the server page cache.
- Geo blocking accidentally hides the site from Google: Googlebot crawls primarily from US IPs but also from Mountain View and a handful of overseas pools. Blocking the United States or any large country will drop you out of Search Console within days. If you must block traffic, block specific IP ranges instead.
- Under Attack Mode left on by mistake: this presents every visitor with a challenge page and deindexes the site from Google within 48 hours. Switch off the moment the attack stops.
Once the CDN is live and verified, the Hostinger WordPress optimization guide covers the next wins: Object Cache, PHP version upgrades, and the Brotli compression toggle that PageSpeed Insights cares about. If you are still in the migration phase, the Hostinger setup and migration guide walks through getting WordPress installed before you tune the edge. For pricing tiers and the wider Hostinger feature set, see the Hostinger hosting guide, or open a Hostinger Business plan if you do not have one yet.
