Will CDN Improve my site speed

Jm2014

Hi There,

I'm looking to improve my wordpress site speed.

My site is a local .ie domain with irish traffic.

My server is hosted in Dublin.

Will a cdn improve speed if all my traffic is local and my sever is located in Ireland?

Vurnon San Benito

Jm2014 wrote: »

Hi There,

I'm looking to improve my wordpress site speed.

My site is a local .ie domain with irish traffic.

My server is hosted in Dublin.

Will a cdn improve speed if all my traffic is local and my sever is located in Ireland?

It would depend on how much traffic you're getting, and what kind of content you're serving. If it's a content-intensive site (images, videos, graphics) etc with large traffic volumes then a CDN will probably help you out.

For what it's worth, I started using a CDN yesterday, called CloudFlare.

My site (as you can see from my sig text url, is a blog), but tends to attract quite a bit of traffic, so I need it to be as fast as I can.

To be honest, since I started using it, I haven't seen much improvement, but I'm going to give it a little while before deciding to stick with, or ditching it.

A lot of optimisation for a site's performance can be done at server level, but overall - a CDN will benefit sites that receive a huge amount of traffic moreso than a site with a few hundred a day.

Hope that helps somewhat.

Aswerty

Just to add to the answer by Doocey.

One of the big advantages of a CDN is that common scripts such as jQuery might already be cached in the users browser from other sites that also use that CDN. This mean that they can skip downloading these scripts altogether. Though to get this benefit you have to use one of the more common CDN's such as google, cloudflare, etc.

Your really just have to profile a client request to your site and see what is causing the delay, if there is any. This can be done in any modern browser.

If you post the URL to your site we can see how big/slow the content of your site is.

tricky D

There's a middle road solution to this issue. A full on CDN may very well be overkill for a 'regular' site unless you are serving out loads and loads of media. Things that typically slow down a 'regular' WP site would be loads of calls for javascripts, css, images, video which are all coming off the same server. Browsers typically only handle a certain amount of connections to a particular server at a time, so if say you have 15 javascript files, 15 css files and 15 images in that order on a page being called off the same server, the browser will take a break after a certain amount of connection requests. Eg. my Mozilla browser setup will only handle 18 requests at a time, so will request the 15 javascript files and 3 css files, then stop until those connection have been 'satisfied' before moving on to the next connection requests. Note 18 requests is at the higher end when you look at page 15 of this: http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/24/11184875/1118487524-15.pdf

Two solutions to improve request speeds based on the above are:
roll up bloated js and css files into single files, and use a sprite for often used image sets, thus reducing the number of requests to a single server.
or
spread these resources into subdomains like js.mysite.com, css.mysite.com and images.mysite.com, thus allowing more resource requests to be made at any time. Even though these subdomains are usually on the same server, they are viewed as separate servers for your purposes and in the case above all 45 resources would connect at the same time.

jmcc

Jm2014 wrote: »

Hi There,

I'm looking to improve my wordpress site speed.

My site is a local .ie domain with irish traffic.

My server is hosted in Dublin.

Will a cdn improve speed if all my traffic is local and my sever is located in Ireland?

What kind of site is it (graphically intensive, text intensive)?
Have you tried Wordpress caching?
What is its daily traffic?

Answer these questions and it might help us help you.

Regards...jmcc

Giblet

In a word, no. From my experience, Irish servers in Dublin are probably faster than a CDN. Caching on assets probably has more of an affect, which is still nothing compared to optimising the speed of the request on the server.

amen

can you post the site url ?

weslers

A CDN is beneficial if your visitors are coming from other locations outside of your hosting residence. If your visitors are from Ireland and your site is hosted in Ireland then a CDN might not improve much. If your visitors are coming from Europe, US or anywhere else then yes a CDN will help.

The CDN will deliver your assets form a location closer to the user. If you don't use a CDN and a user from US visits your site they are getting the assets from the hosting company in Ireland if you use a CDN the assets will be delivered from with the US(provided the CDN supplier you choose has servers located in that location).

Have a look at this link which might help explain it better. gtmetrix.com/why-use-a-cdn.html

There are a few things you can do first to improve your site speed before looking into a CDN. Try either of the following WP plugins they will allow you to cache content, minify JS and CSS along with a few other things to help improve load times.

- W3 Total Cache wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
- WP Super Cache wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/

Sorry about the links new user so am not allowed to post them correctly.

Talisman

The purpose of a CDN is to offload the serving of bandwidth heavy content from the web server. If the website serves pages with a lot of rich media content then a CDN will definitely improve the loading performance no matter where the website visitors are located geographically. A CDN can serve the content faster because it has a much faster connection (10Gb vs 1Gb/100Mb/10Mb).

Offloading the serving of content from the website's server means that your website will be more responsive and more requests can be handled.

Do you need a CDN? That all depends on your hosting setup. If you're using a shared hosting package then your website shares a server with a lot of other websites and this will affect the performance. In this situation, using a CDN is a good idea.

If you have control of the server hosting the website then you can configure the web server to deliver better performance by instructing the visitor's browser to cache static content and also enabling compression so that fewer bytes of data are sent by the server.

Services such as WebPageTest and GTmetrix will give you a good indication of what you can do to improve the speed of your website before going down the CDN route.

For WordPress using a cache plugin is nearly always a good idea : W3 Total Cache is considered the best, it has a lot of settings for tweaking the cache.

Jm2014

Thanks Guys for the above reply's.

My site is Image and text heavy as its a listings website.

I also sometimes loose the site getting a 404 error.

As I am new to the world of website design and hosting I'm not sure if its my hosting provider that's the cause of my slow site/crashing or is it my site code.


I have contacted my hosting provider and they have replied with the following I have removed any details from my hosting provider in the following email:




Please see the attached graphis showing load time for your page.

We can see a few things almost immediately.

Firstly, there are 180 different requests made from the server each time your home page is loaded - this is much higher than average, and connection requests are one of the things that can significantly slow your site down for visitors.

Next, the total content delivered by your home page is 2.8MB - this is excessive and (for example) would take 25-30 seconds to download by someone on a 1Mbps broadband link.

The time taken to deliver the first byte of page content is itself not that bad (generally under a second, you appear to have a page cache installed) but there is half a megabyte of text there and that also is unusually large - most pages are 100-200KB of html).

Where all this will cause the most problems is when you start driving traffic to your site - the sheer volume of traffic and connections required to deliver a single page means that especially on shared hosting (and to a lesser extent on VPS) means that with only relatively few simultaneous visitors requests will start stacking and delaying page delivery.

Right now your biggest issue is the size of each page, we would recommend getting total page size down to about 1MB so that it would load within 10 seconds even on a slow link .. although broadband speeds have increased, there is still a decent percentage of people using slower DSL connections or mobile broadband etc. Try to have less than 100 requests per page (50 would be better) and try to remove unnecessary elements (unused JS/CSS etc from each page).


Moving to a VPS should also be considered as this would allow you to use opcode caching (APC) and/or memory caching (memcached etc) to store more of your site in memory rather than having to pull it from disk or database all the time. Also, you can use additional memory to speed up general database access. VPS will also allow more simultaneous access which means you can handle more visitors without the site slowing down.

Jm2014

Thanks Guys for the above reply's.

My site is Image and text heavy as its a listings website. I am using a shared server.

I also sometimes loose the site getting a 404 error.

As I am new to the world of website design and hosting I'm not sure if its my hosting provider that's the cause of my slow site/crashing or is it my site code.


I have contacted my hosting provider and they have replied with the following I have removed any details from my hosting provider in the following email:




Please see the attached graphis showing load time for your page.

We can see a few things almost immediately.

Firstly, there are 180 different requests made from the server each time your home page is loaded - this is much higher than average, and connection requests are one of the things that can significantly slow your site down for visitors.

Next, the total content delivered by your home page is 2.8MB - this is excessive and (for example) would take 25-30 seconds to download by someone on a 1Mbps broadband link.

The time taken to deliver the first byte of page content is itself not that bad (generally under a second, you appear to have a page cache installed) but there is half a megabyte of text there and that also is unusually large - most pages are 100-200KB of html).

Where all this will cause the most problems is when you start driving traffic to your site - the sheer volume of traffic and connections required to deliver a single page means that especially on shared hosting (and to a lesser extent on VPS) means that with only relatively few simultaneous visitors requests will start stacking and delaying page delivery.

Right now your biggest issue is the size of each page, we would recommend getting total page size down to about 1MB so that it would load within 10 seconds even on a slow link .. although broadband speeds have increased, there is still a decent percentage of people using slower DSL connections or mobile broadband etc. Try to have less than 100 requests per page (50 would be better) and try to remove unnecessary elements (unused JS/CSS etc from each page).


Moving to a VPS should also be considered as this would allow you to use opcode caching (APC) and/or memory caching (memcached etc) to store more of your site in memory rather than having to pull it from disk or database all the time. Also, you can use additional memory to speed up general database access. VPS will also allow more simultaneous access which means you can handle more visitors without the site slowing down.

Aswerty

It sounds like your host has given a decent enough assessment of your website.

Honestly, you want your site loading in approx 2 seconds and definitely under 3 seconds. The quicker the better of course. Most users will give up on a site if it doesn't load within a few seconds.

There is a lot of things to know when improving the performance of a website. So you have a lot to read up on. But there is also some great free tools around to help you understand what your site is doing. First of all your browser will have built in developer tools. These tools will allow you to measure how long it takes to load all the files for a single web page. The typical files are HTML, CSS, Javascript, Fonts, and Images. One thing to note about the 2.8MB content size; if the files are compressed before they are transported this can mean the browser actually only downloads, say, 1.5MB (at a guess). So the load time might actually be more like 10 - 15 seconds for visitors hitting your site the first time. Compression is normally done using gzip and you will typically set compression to be done in the web server itself. Compression is one of the biggest helpers in reducing load time so it is a must. Depending on your setup you may already be performing compression.

Browsers will also cache static files (i.e. files that don't change each time they are loaded). Most files are generally of this type and caching will seriously reduce load times for users after they have already downloaded one page from your site. To load a page on your site like it is the first time you were visiting it, hold "ctrl" and press "F5" on any page. This will cause the browser to reload the site (F5) but the "ctrl" causes the browser to ignore its cache and reload all the content it has already cached. After doing that you can the just hit "F5" on it's own and you'll probably see a significant difference in load times. The previously mention browser tools will be a great help in seeing exactly where the differences are happening. Once you understand the concept of caching you'll see that there is two load times for a page; one where content is already cached and the other when no content is cached.

One tool I like for grading the load performance of a website is YSlow. You can get it if you go to http://yslow.org/. It is a browser extension (if you use firefox you also have to install the firebug lite extension to use it). Just click on your browser icon after you follow the link. This site also give a list of 23 things to do to improve performance. For me items 1, 4, 5, 9, and 11 are probably where you'll make most of your improvements. Note item 4 is use a CDN but I'd push that out till last since as mentioned above without international traffic the impact is less than it could be. A CDN is actually a tool better used to improve performance on a site that is getting a lot of traffic as opposed to getting decent performance on a newly created site.

Lastly I'll just reiterate that if you are serious about creating a web site with good performance you need to use your browser's developer tools. Without them you'll blind to what is actually occuring during a page load.

Jm2014

If just noticed that wordpress is not installed in the root folder, my hosting company is using parallels, would this redirection use cause these problems, atm my homepage is taking around 7-8 secs to load.

Does all .ie hosting company's use parallels?

I have a developer doing the following for me, hopefully this will make some speed increases

Part 1
Leverage browser caching with expiry dates and add expire headers
Optimize image sizes
Specify image dimensions
Combine images into sprites
Enable gzip compression
Defer parsing of JavaScript

Part 2
Make fewer HTTP requests by combining javascripts and css files

devildriver

From your hosting company's report it would seem your main problem is optimisation.

180 requests is very very high for a single page. I would assume you are using a lot of plugins with each one making it's own javascript calls and css calls to the server.

If you analyse your site using Pingdom you can get a graphical representation of the "blockages" in your site.

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

GTMetrix etc mentioned above are also good but Pingdom's reports are easy to understand.

If you want to post a screenshot of the results with your personal details omitted then we can see which resources are causing the problems and perhaps advise on removing some of the bloat from your site.

I would still advise using Cloudflare afterwards as it's a very good security enhancement for your site and outside of it's CDN functionality can speed up your site by providing faster DNS.

CentimoSal

It helps improve loading time

A CDN isn't just fast - but insulates assets like images away to another server - so you're hosting provider doesn't get the brunt.

I am aware most hosting providers offer a lot of bandwidth anyway - but said bandwidth can quickly run out when a site reahces no.1 on hackernews, or slashdot, or other highly trafficed news sources.

If your content is new information, or has a tendency to be viral and controversial - you might want to switch to blogger / wordpress - as they're built on world class infrastructure - Blogger even switches the domain depending on country.

e.g yourviralblog.blogspot.ie
yourviralblog.blogspot.com
yourviralblog.blogspot.de

Cloudflare can absorb a great deal of traffic - but be sure to configure CF right, as most people leave it in the default setting, and you can potentially lock out a great deal of legitimate traffic, as it can be quite strict for those surfing under VPNs / proxies / secure-browsers

tricky D

Something else to bear in mind is the costs which typically range between $0.40 to $0.02 per Gigabyte depending on provider and volume. I'd guess you would be at the expensive end of that range. With that in mind, I'd suggest looking at the other options outlined in the thread first (merging certain assets to reduce the number of requests, spreading assets across sub or other domains, compression, optimisation, caching...). Just be sure to apply any cookies to and from your www. domain.