There are many methods that can be used to speed up our website and CDN (Content Delivery Network) is one of them. This method can be integrated with WordPress, which is a very popular CMS. End users will be given the best performance and search engine bots will be able to smoothly crawl the website. We should be aware that the overall performance of the website also contributes to our search engine ranks. Slow loading websites wouldn’t be able to rank properly compared to those with good performance.
Website owners should make sure that their websites could work properly, even during peak traffic hours. Even without CDN, WordPress is already known as a platform with good overall performance and CDN will make sure that it will perform even better, especially during more serious situations. File transfers can be properly parallelized across the host names. It means that CDN can easily handle multiple requests for scripts, CSS, images and other things. During normal operations, one request is handled one at a time and this will delay the delivery of the content.
The parallel handling of requests are designed to ensure that servers won’t work too hard. Very aggressive handling of multiple requests could slow down the servers, making the website to load slowly. It means that CDN will detect idle resources and the multiple request handling won’t be enabled if the server is already near its full capacity. CDN is a cost-effective system for WordPress websites and there are external CDN networks that we can choose if we want to fully optimize the performance of our website and server.
Low-cost CDN service is available for as low as $10 and it could improve the performance of our website by up to 30 percent. This is an affordable investment, because we don’t need to migrate our website to a server with more powerful hardware configuration. During peak hours, the extra boost in performance should allow users to move between webpages more smoothly. Fortunately, there is an even cheaper way of obtaining the CDN capability by using the available resources in WordPress.
The popular W3 Total Cache plugin provides us with CDN capability. There are steps that we can do to configure CDN network on our blog using the existing domain. Before we go further, it is important to know that we should make a backup of the whole directory and SQL database. Before doing anything big, the first thing that we do is to perform the backup process, so the latest data can be restored if something really bad happens to our website.
Bad things can happen to our website and we should make sure that our backup is updated and working properly. We can ask our web developers on how to build a CDN using the W3 Total Cache plugin. We will need the FTP client tool and we need to login with our FTP user account. Some editing and configuring are needed, as an example, we will need to edit the wp-config file. If the task seems too challenging, it is a good idea to ask someone to do this for us.