Speeding Up your Website Tip: Use a CDN

Content Delivery Network or CDN is the next tip to speed up your website. There are many reasons, but the main one has to be with your machine. Depending on the browser, you may have one or multiple threads requesting HTTP objects in parallel. I read someone else, that Chrome has a 6 thread limit (I am not sure, but bear with me, it is a small number). Additionally, a web server that hosts everything generally does it in a FIFO way, the first request is the first attended. So, so far there are two bottlenecks we need to get rid of.

To show you I will use my business website https://okay.network and I will use Google PageSpeed Insights as the metric.

The only change that was changed was the use of a CDN network. The website is done totally with Joomla and I use the JCH PRO plugin to handle the speeding things. JCH has CDN support.

Comparing Before vs After Applying a CDN

Before the CDN

After the CDN

What Happens When I use a CDN?

As I have explained before, two big things are happening:

1. The browser now is able to request twice the objects in parallel. In this case, I only used static.okay.network to host all static files, I could use images.static.okay.network, fonts.static.okay.network, javascript.static.okay.network and so on to have more simultaneous queries. But I didn't in this case.
2. My main WEB server (the one that hosts Joomla and processes the PHP) is less loaded, therefore PHP processing is faster and the HTML is delivered almost right away.

I hope this gives everybody an insight on why you should use a CDN. The big reason is the SEO, one of the well-known factors to rank above others is the server speed. The faster, the higher rank you will get. Speed is not everything, but it is important.

Good Luck!