Page speed is one of the most important factors to keep visitors on a website. Nowadays, if you don’t want to lose your visitors then you need to have a fast website. There are lots of methods to optimize websites. In this post, we’ll see how to improve the static content loading speed using Content Delivery Networks
When a page is loaded by a browser, the first time is loaded the main page file. That is the main “html”, php, jsp or asp file. Then the css, js and image files are loaded. This takes in most of the cases more than 80% of the entire page loading operation. So if you want to have a fast website you have to optimize the loading of css, js and images. All those files are static files, they are not changed in any way when the page is loaded, so beside compressing them there is not much to be done.
The static content loading can be optimized in a few ways: minimizing the number of browser requests, compressing the static files and using a Content Delivery Network. In this post we are going to cover only the last option.
As we mentioned static content loading speed can e improved by using a Content Delivery Network . A Content Delivery Network is a group of servers placed in different places of the world, storing the same files. When a file is required it is retrieved from the closest location, having a good loading time.
For example if a file is requested by someone from Japan, it will be loaded from a nearby server, probably in Japan. If the same file will be requested from a someone browsing from Germany, the file will probably be retrieved from somewhere in Europe. This will ensure faster loading speed.
The content delivery networks can be easily used for existing sites because the only required change is the location of static files to a location like this one: http://static.website.com/file.css.
The CDN services have a higher cost than the usual hosting, because you need to distribute the content on several servers spread over the world. That implies an additional cost, which could be afforded only by large companies. Those days cheaper CDN solutions appeared so if you run a successful blog you find a CDN at a decent cost
In a future post I will make a comparison between several Content Delivery Networks.