One of the most effective ways to increase the speed of a website is to integrate a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
A CDN is essentially a network of highly optimized servers that replicate the static content of your site (CSS, Javascript, images, etc.) and serves it from the closest Point of Presence (POP).
Um, why do I want this again?
There are several reasons why you might want to consider integrating a CDN. Let’s walk through six of them (or skip to my recommendation):
- Dramatically decrease load times
- Increase in the number of concurrent users
- Lower hosting costs
- Lighten the load on your server
- Better search engine rankings
- It’s easy to do—there’s no excuse
Dramatically decrease load times
Integrating a CDN is one of the most effective ways to get your site to load faster for visitors, regardless of location, internet connection, and device (computer vs. mobile device).
This is great for user experience, as data have shown modest increases in site speed to have significant increases in user engagement and time spent on a site. Put simply, users refuse to wait for a slow-loading site.
Increase in the number of concurrent users
Particularly in the case of fast-growing sites, integrating a CDN is a great way to dramatically increase capacity. With the typical client-server model, a fixed number of clients (people using computers and mobile devices) at one time. This is still true once a CDN is integrated, but a ten-fold increase in this number can often be achieved.
Lower hosting costs
There’s often a significant disparity between mid-level and top-tier web hosting options available. One of the reasons I had to leave MediaTemple is because their most powerful (dv) option was unable to meet my hosting needs, and the next step up was a whopping $750 per month.
Instead of making this incredibly expensive leap, website owners would be wise to consider using a CDN to boost site performance without breaking the bank. An affordable, robust server through VPS.net coupled with a CDN (the architecture upon which this site is built) can outperform most sites on the web.
Lighten the load on your server
Since the majority of your static content will be served from POPs all over the world (as opposed to one server in one location), there is an immediate and dramatic reduction in the effort required by your server to deliver your site to visitors.
The most troublesome server issues only appear when a server is under extreme load, so reducing this strain and eliminating bottlenecks is in the interest of both website admins and the end-user.
Better search engine rankings
Google has officially indicated that they have started taking page load speed into consideration when ranking websites. Ranking well in search engines depends on dozens of factors, and site speed has now been thrown in the mix.
The way you win on the web is to to optimize everything, from your site to the server. If your site is in a very competitive niche, it stands to reason that your site could see a slight boost in rankings by including site speed in the list of things that you optimize for.
It’s easy to do—there’s no excuse
It’s possible to integrate a CDN into a WordPress site in about 30 seconds, thanks to Frederick Townes’s amazing W3 Total Cache plugin. The CDN support baked right into the plugin makes adding a CDN to your site a trivial ordeal.
Recommendation
The CDN I tested on this site is by MaxCDN. I’ve done quite a bit of testing and experimenting and I’m extremely pleased with the overall performance and price point. My site loads in a breeze using a setup that doesn’t break the bank.
If you’re interested in this option and would like to ask a few questions, please drop me a note in the comments or hit me up using the contact form—I’d be happy to chat.
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Couldn’t agree anymore. Adding a CDN to your site is something great that you can to really help create a better experience.
We started using a CDN a few months ago and I won’t create another site that doesn’t use a CDN, it’s really a great idea and easy to implement.
We also use W3 Total Cache, so I can vouch for that plugin as well as a great resource.
Hey Jonathan, thanks for dropping by. I’m like you—absolutely ruined for creating a site without at least strongly considering a CDN.
Jonathan,
Great post. It’s so blatantly obvious, but so hard to summarise the way you did.
We at cdnxite.com have the same ideas about CDNs. Check out our site, because we have a great tool to check which CDN provider would actually be fastest for you! We also do consultancy for people looking to get their site up an running and our we have very friendly staff with a “free advice” policy.
Point your mates to us if they need any help with CDNs.
Thanks Keerthi. I had never heard of cdnXite before today, but I really like that CDN ping tool. It reminds me of CloudHarmony’s Speedtest.
Friendly staff and who offer free advice and setup assistance is really smart. A happy customer who tells others about your service is the best marketing.
Willie-
I arrived at this page not knowing what a CDN was. Not only did your excellent explanations cure that deficiency but after scanning through your archives, I’m now jazzed about all the other “good stuff” you have created. I bookmarked your site and will definitely return for more tips. Thanks and keep up the good work!
Jason
Well that comment officially made my day—thanks Jason. Please shoot me a note if I can be of assistance with anything. Take care!
I like this post and I agree on everything your saying. An important factor to the matter is even if you’re using VPS net or if you’re using Media Temple, you can still attach a CDN to any hosting provider.
You may feel better about getting everything from one provider (VPS net) or 2 separate providers (Media Temple + CDN Network)
Your site loading speed is very quick and I’m looking into solutions to speed mine up. I’m not confident about managing my own VPS so I’m going the 2 provider way.
Great Post,
Jonny
Hey Jonny, running your own VPS is less involved than you might think. Aside from running an update command every few weeks, there’s very little I do to maintain mine.
You can indeed integrate a CDN regardless of your hosting paradigm. VPS + CDN is the most potent combination in my experience.
Hi, Willie I arrived here from your other post on the diythemes.com post (Performance Unleashed: How To Optimize Websites For Speed).
I have downloaded the Firefox plug-in as you recommended to check loading speed on pages as you suggested, and I see that your site has a 99/100 rating which is fabulous (is 100/100 an empty page?…)
I would like to know how much nodes you rented on VPS.Net as this is quite expensive, starting at 20$/month for one node. It’s about twice as much as a pro pack hosting on 1and1.fr the host I use for my clients.
This Wordpress website (http://headtotoefashionart.com/) is on one of those packs and the speed rate is 90/100 (but there are quite a few contents and design images). I have also implemented WP Minify instead of W3 Total Cache as I found it too complex to configure although I have no doubt that it will do miracles in the right hands.
This said you hit the nail each time and the posts I have read so far are two of the best around to help optimize ones’ Wordpress website. Excellent. W
Hey William, thanks for checking out both my posts. I experiment with the number of nodes I use on my site, but I don’t see any performance difference between using 2 and up to 10 nodes.
For small sites with low traffic, a well-optimized one or two-node VPS should be more than sufficient—I’ve got four sites running on a single VPS for a friend of mine. Two are WordPress instances.
Thanks Willie, useful to know. I hadn’t heard about these particular CDN servers before today, and they are a good option if a client requires the utmost speed on his site.
I am quite happy about my set up on the site I gave you the url earlier (still on construction) and I have even used the SpriteMe application for my menu bar. Easy to implement. and it saves me two http requests. W
Willie,
I used that plugin and picked up an average of 4 points on 3 sites. Thanks for the tip. I will start implementing some of your other ides.
Bob
That’s what I like to hear! Cheers Bob.
This sounds pretty cool, but soon I’m going to try this for my websites:
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html
It’s an apache module which is supposed to auto-speed up your website. I have not had a chances to check it out since my current host doesn’t support it, but I’m moving to c-panel in January and going to set it up… I have several sites that are #1 for keywords and they are average speed. I hope this module will help a lot with speed. I have found just enabling compression has helped a lot for speed. I roll my own sites, but found the article interesting!
Hey Sean, mod_pagespeed is indeed a very cool project. I use the W3 Total Cache plugin as the hub of my WordPress performance optimizations (at least on the client-side), so this is effectively included in my configurations. It’s definitely worth looking into if you’re not leveraging the plugin though.
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