Making Tweaks with Your Site’s CDN

In March I wrote about the benefits of installing a CDN (Content Delivery Network) on your website to speed it up. It’s no secret Google has recently been looking at website load time as a factor in where they place you in the rankings. Google has even been providing tips on their blog as to how you can decrease the time a visitor waits for your content to load.

After experimenting with my own CDN for over a month, I’ve come to a few conclusions on how I can speed my site up even more. The statistics show that most of my bandwidth is being used up by my header file, which surprisingly, racks up 500 MB per day on the CDN in bandwidth. The file itself isn’t too large in file size, but it can always be made smaller. I compressed it down a bit in Photoshop and cut off about 50 KB. Another interesting fact that the CDN pointed out was other smaller theme files in PNG format, which were also eating up bandwidth. I edited those down on to a transparent background and re-uploaded them to save even more resources in JPG format.

Using a CDN has drastically cut down on the bandwidth I use through my web hosting company, and has allowed for more traffic to come in during high peaks without causing a strain on system resources. For 1 TB of bandwidth for $10 (MaxCDN), you can’t really go wrong.

There are always additional tweaks to be made to a site’s speed and I’m currently running the Firebug add-on for Firefox. Firebug analyzes your site’s code and informs you on where improvements can be made both from a web standards view, and from a load time perspective.

Recent speed tests have shown my site comes up faster than CNN, TechCrunch and the Huffington Post. Can’t complain about that!

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