CDN ( Content Delivery Network ) is an option to serve static content on webpage from a cookie-less domain to improve the page load speed. Now a days browsers are much sophisticated and can handle more than 5 domains (DNS) at a time to retrieve information from there while loading a page. As you know that if your web page loads faster, that will help you in getting good PageRank from Google as well. You can utilize the browser capability at max by using CDN to improve the page load time and speed to make your website much faster on web. There are premium services like MaxCDN to create a CDN network for your website but that is not needed for regular websites. If you are having own hosting server then you can create own CDN on your hosting account by following simple steps. You can compress the JavaScripts and CSS to load page faster but CDN technique is all together way to quickly serve whatever static content is on the page.
Note: It is recommended to use different hosting server to serve static content from CDN. But if your site is not having huge traffic like more than 1 million Pageviews a month, then you can setup CDN on same hosting server to improve page load speed.
For Websites or Blogs not using WordPress platform
[ad id=’7′ style=’float:left;margin:10px 10px 10px 0′]If you are having a normal HTML website rather than CMS platform like WordPress, you can create CDN on for website using following steps.
– Create a sub-domain on existing domain or register a new domain to serve static content. There is no difference in page load speed in sub-domain or new domain
– While creating the sub-domain for existing domain, point the sub-domain to the root folder of main domain i.e. point that to public_html folder of your hosting directory incase you are using that folder as root for the website
– Now add CNAME record for that sub-domain in your hosting account. If you are having access to WHM, you can add CNAME from the option named as “Edit DNS” in WHM
– If you have created sub-domain as “cdn.example.com”, then now start pointing static contents like images, JavaScripts etc. in your HTML to retrieve from that sub-domain only. Before adding that, just test once that whether those images or JS are opening with new address or not.
– You can create more than one CDN to serve content really fast for your website / blog. To create more CDN, just follow the above steps
Plugins to handle CDN for WordPress Users
As WordPress users are having power of Plugins, for this purpose they are having couple of plugins as well. Whether you are using WP Super Cache or WP Total Cache plugin, you have the option to add CDN to serve static content faster for your WordPress blog. To create a CDN network for your WordPress blog, you will have to follow the steps mentioned in the list for non-WordPress users. But you don’t need to point the static content manually in the template file, that will be done by plugin automatically. Once you are done with creating the CDN domain or sub-domain, just go to the CDN option available in these plugins and add the CDN domain in the CDN URL box to start serving static content from that subdomain. You are done with the CDN settings in WordPress. Now load the web page and see the source code to check the URL of static contents like Images, JavaScripts, wp-include folder contents, Favicon etc. You can add more than one CDN network for this purpose, plugin will automatically distribute the load on different CDN.
You can see the difference in web page load time and speed on Pingdom Tool or you can ask your friends to provide feedback on page load speed after adding CDN.