jumpstart your WordPress

It has been said that “Speed kills!” As far as websites are concerned, it is the lack of speed that is a killer. Speed  is a major factor in whether your site gets looked at or passed over. With literally a billion sites on the web (according to internet livestats.com ), you not only have to get users to the front door, but you have only seconds to get their attention.

The billion sites figure is not meant to scare or discourage anyone (75% of that billion are registered domains that are not active).

The point is that you have a short frame time to impress people once you get them to your front door, so your pages should load quickly. About 3 seconds is what the experts say is  acceptable page load time. After that your site starts losing visitors.

What Is A CDN?

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a large networked group of servers (instead of just one) that serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. Two concepts are neccessary to explain why a CDN helps your speed.

1. Latency Time

time between your browser requesting a page and getting a response from the sever.

2. Transfer time

is time between request  and bringing the file to the browser.

 

So how does the CDN fix this? By routing file requests to servers that are actually physically closer to the user, latency time time is reduced. Serving content from servers closer to the end-user, transfer time is also decreased.

There are many companies offering CDN services but I would recommend Cloudflare for the following reasons.

  • Easy setup (A plugin available at WordPress Plugin Repository)
    Adds Security from Brute Force Attacks
    Analytics
    Available for free

CDNs are not the solution to all speed issues. They are one method of increasing your site’s speed. We will cover other methods here in the future. If you find that the CDN helps you (or not), leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you!

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