Configure WordPress To Use Content Delivery Network

Is your Wordpress site loading too slowly? Search engines have been placing a lot more emphasis on the loading speed of web pages recently. In fact, Google has explicitly mentioned that they rank sites based on the loading speed of websites. So if your website is loading very slowly, perhaps a Content Delivery Network can help. But first, you need to understand what is a CDN before you can make full use of it.

A Content Delivery Network, otherwise known as a CDN, is a network made up of many computers or servers that contain data. When you try to access data from the network, the computer that is nearest your location will be used to serve up the data. This ensures that all content requested loads quickly. It also prevents a bottle neck when all sites request content from the same server.

In addition, because your Wordpress site loads content from CDN servers, this reduces the load from your own web server and leads to increase in server performance. You also save on server space because files can be uploaded to the CDN network.

A reliable CDN network service is usually provided by reliable hosting Companies such as Amazon, MaxCDN or RackSpace. Google’s CDN based Javascript library is also available for use. Let’s take a look at how a file loads in a CDN scenario.

Let’s say you have a 5MB video file on your Wordpress site. If you only have it on your server, and your server is located in the United States, then a visitor from the US will get the fastest download speed. But what if someone from Hong Kong visits your website and tries to download the same files? He will surely experience a slower download speed. This is the typical download scenario.

However, in a CDN scenario, the file can be replicated across many servers in different locations, including Hong Kong. So when a Hong Kong web visitor tries to download the file, he will be accessing the file in the HK server and will experience a much faster download speed.

To configure CDN for Wordpress, you will need a special plugin such as W3 Total Cache. You will need to update the plugin with FTP login info to facilitate the uploading of files to the CDN network. Various options will be made available to you within the plugin settings page.

In general, you want to upload files that are frequently assessed by web visitors to the CDN network. For instance, all template files and images should be uploaded to the network. You can also upload CSS or Javascript files that are requested with every page load.

So far, reports about CDN has been very encouraging. A Wordpress site with hefty plugins have been reported to reduce loading times from 7 seconds to just 2 seconds.

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