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CDN – Content Delivery Network
Posted on 19. Apr, 2011 by Philip in Big Trousers News, Software, Web design
Over the last few months we have been testing various methods of achieving an effective method of speeding up page load times for WordPress for our client sites. Along with numerous site caching plugins and file optimisation we have found a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Amazon Web Services, is the best way to achieve fast page load and protection from server overload. Search engines like Google, measure and factor in the speed of web sites in their ranking algorithm. When they recommend a site they want to make sure users find what they’re looking for quickly. So in effect you and Google should have the same objective.
A CDN is a high performance cache that stores static assets like media, CSS files and javascript in various locations throughout the world in order to provide low latency access to them by readers in those regions.
Benefits
- At least 10x improvement in overall site performance (Significant Google Page Speed improvements) when fully configured
- Improve conversion rates and “site performance” which affect your site’s rank on Google.com
- “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
- Optimized progressive render (pages start rendering immediately)
- Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
- Improved web server performance (sustain high traffic periods)
- Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds
Whilst we have hit some bumps along the way we have done enough trials to get a number of sites fully optimised for this purpose. Some existing sites require a fair degree of coaxing on the Amazon server with various permissions errors, and some plugin data (wp e-commerce installations prior to vers 3.8) has been difficult to manage, we feel that it is now time to deploy CDN functionality for our clients.
We are in the process of finishing a site with wp-e commerce plugin version 3.8 with positive results and in time we will have a test of a full site with and without CDN so as to provide a direct test example. In the meantime take a look at Treelogic.com.au. There site is a good example of one that does require speed of delivery. They post images, stories, pdf fact sheets and video as solid content that drives traffic and promotes use of their online store. The examples below show page design and source code showing links to the cdn.
If you have been experiencing slow load times for your site contact Big Trousers to deploy a CDN. If we already host you site it should be fairly straight forward. If not then perhaps we should.