How Can I Improve the Speed of My WordPress Website?
At We Interactive, we love MaxCDN. When we started using their service, the speed improvement was mind boggling. Before, you could only get the front page of this site to load in about 3-4 seconds, measured by Pingdom, (check your site here). Now, the front page loads in less than a second:
You’ll want to know how I did this right? Keep on reading (and find the Yoast coupon code below)!
What is a CDN?
Basically, CDN means Content Delivery Network or it could be Content Distribution Network. It is a network of vastly optimized servers all over the world yet it is a little “tweaked” as you will always hit which server is nearby. When it comes to performance, this shows immense improvement for websites that welcomes visitors from different continents of the world.
A CDN for WordPress
Using W3 Total Cache, I have automatically transferred files into this WordPress CDN solution.
- my themes image files
- my themes js files
- my themes css files
- the js files that come with WordPress that are not hosted by Google (eg. thickbox)
- all my uploaded files
It actually took me 10-amazing-seconds to transfer all these. To do it, you can go to W3 Total Cache settings, enable the CDN function the select MaxCDN or NetDNA. After that, you can go the CDN tab then enter your CNAMEs and API credentials then press test.
Who should use a WordPress CDN solution?
Basically, everyone is qualified to use WordPress CDN solution as it distributes your data across the globe. It is best used by websites that create lots of traffic and generates thousands of viewers, more liberal and vast WordPress blogs, and websites with lots of videos and images content, as it increases the speed of uploading and downloading. Other huge websites could benefit in this as well as CDN broadcasts the files or loads across a network of servers.
Is it expensive?
With the said benefits and amazingly fast speed of MaxCDN, you might have thought that it would be expensive. Well, that goes the same with me! With small website plans starting at $9.95/month, it makes it a no-brainer to get started.