If you have already adopted or are planning to adopt a content delivery network, you are probably quite aware of the benefits. You likely understand that a CDN can improve your Google rankings, encourage longer visits and improve your conversion rates. However, to obtain the best performance from your static CDN service, you may need to make a few modifications. The following information can help you improve your CDN performance.
What Are the Primary Causes of a Slow Site With CDN?
Although a CDN can be an extremely effective way to speed up your website, there are several ways to reduce its performance inadvertently. Here are some issues that can slow down CDN performance as well as some helpful tips.
1.Hardware: Although a CDN will lighten the load on your server, if your server lacks the capacity to handle even the lightened load, you will not obtain the best results from your CDN service. RAM and CPU spikes can signal the need to upgrade your hardware. CPU spikes and memory leaks could also result from software bugs, but certain server misconfigurations frequently reduce CDN performance.
- Network: The internet service provider is a common cause of poor performance. Internet outages, bandwidth issues, ISP jams and distributed denial-of-service attacks are the leading causes of network problems.
- Cache: Optimizing your website requires intelligent caching. This means that caching needs to consider the individual objects. For example, scripts or other files requiring frequent updates typically need lower control ages, but applying identical settings to static objects can slow down a CDN service dramatically. Therefore, the cache expiry time should be set to the far future. Conflicting cache-control headers can also exacerbate the problem.
- Side Scripts: Analytic tools, JavaScript files and other side scripts that are hosted by third parties can impact the performance of your CDN. Your CDN can only speed up your content, and it will not be able to accelerate objects that exist on other servers.
- Images: Images can be a heavy burden. Use a good compression tool to decrease the file sizes of the images on your site. It is also advisable to use JPEG or PNG for static images.
- HTTP Requests: Every HTTP request will slow the loading of your site. Limit the number of requests as much as possible. For example, instead of using single images, consider using image sprites.
- Settings: Set the query string and the set-cookies settings to ignore. Setting the query string will improve performance by increasing the cache hit ratio. Generating set-cookie headers for static assets is typically useless and will usually slow your loading times.
- Minify: JavaScript and CSS files can be minified to reduce CDN traffic, thereby boosting performance.
- Location: Having the servers hosting your CDN content geographically near to your users is an excellent way to improve the performance of your CDN. For example, if most users are located in Asia, having your origin in New York is going to have a detrimental impact. A CDN works best when the latency between the origin and the CDN is minimized.
Stay Proactive
Once you feel that you have optimized your CDN, you will want to test its performance. Instead of using your service domain, use your service identifier for the tests. You will also want to use a reliable tool to analyze your site’s performance under real-world conditions so that you can make any changes needed to optimize its performance. You should also stay current on new developments that can help maintain or enhance the performance of your site. For example, the HTTP/2 protocol is faster, so integrating your CDN over the https:// scheme and making use of the newer protocol can help you boost your performance. Always keep in mind that the best practices today may not be the best practices a year from now, so stay proactive and flexible.
