Speed is important. If a visitor comes to your site and everything takes forever to load, do you think they’re going to want to come back? Your content had better be good because if it’s not, no one is going to wait on your slow blog. It just doesn’t work that way. Humans are naturally impatient. Waiting doesn’t work.
Over the years, I’ve tried my hardest to learn the best ways to make my sites faster. I want darn near instant load times. I don’t want to wait on my own stuff to load. Before I dive in to talking about Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) here’s some things that I’ve learned:
- Images are often the heaviest things on a blog
- CSS/JS files can be heavy and are great candidates for caching
- White space = byte space. If you can fit it on one line – do it.
- RAM is crucial – get more or get gone.
- Databases generate overhead. Take care of it.
- Revision history = bloat.
That’s some of what I’ve learned over the years. I can’t go through everything. I need some consulting jobs every now and then. I’m sure you understand.
Content Delivery Networks are like giant caches of static files. CDNs aren’t designed for dynamic files, so don’t try and use them for that! You’d just be disappointed.
Here’s how it works:
MaxCDN's Edge Locations
- You upload a file to your CDN
- That file is then distributed to edge servers around the country or maybe even the world!
- When that file is accessed, the edge server closest to the requester responds and delivers the content.
Simple, right?
Distance matters, and someone finally realized that when CDNs were developed. The closer the file to the requester, the faster it’s going to load. That’s why CDNs speed things up.
Who Needs a CDN?
Do you have slow load times, large amounts of visitors? Does your hosting plan offer little to no storage? Are you willing to spend a few extra bucks a month?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re a candidate and should seriously consider moving to a CDN.
The average cost is $.15/GB. That’s cheap! You do pay for bandwidth, but it’s a negligible amount of money. You’d only feel it if you have a massive amount of traffic.
Now comes the hard part: who to use.
Pick a CDN:
Here’s the big 4 in the game:
- Amazon S3/ Cloudfront
- Rackspace Cloudfiles
- MaxCDN
- Akamai
Each has their own list of pros and cons. Amazon and Akamai, for example, own their networks. Rackspace and Max partner with Limelight Networks and NetDNA respectively.
There’s more than those 4, of course, but those are 4 of the biggest CDN providers I can think of.
I won’t recommend one over the other, but I can tell you, no matter who you pick, you’ll be pleased with your load times!
You’ve Picked One, Now What?
There’s a few ways to do this. You can change the code in your blog to point to your CDN or you can find a plugin to do the dirty work for you.
I won’t go into the details of either, but I’d suggest finding a plugin…unless modifying WordPress code is your thing…
I use W3-Total-Cache. I give it the access info to my CDN and then tell it what to upload and then use. It’s really simple.
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Those are the basics. CDNs are awesome, hands down. They’re cheap, they’re fast, and they help!
I’d encourage any blogger to look into it. I did, and I haven’t looked back.
If you have any questions, need some help, have something to add…the comments are open!
