A Guide to Speed up Your Website Using CDN
Last Updated: April 28, 2021 in Guides
Page load speed greatly affects a website and is a factor to decide the ranking of your website. It can be said that speeding up and maintaining the continuity of the website’s performance is extremely important for webmasters.
If your page is not opened within 3s, you need to reconsider your page loading speed right away.
In this problem, there is a tool that can help the speed webmaster perform well in the above task, which is CDN content delivery network. So, what is a CDN, and how to use it? You can find the answer in the article written below.
What is a CDN?
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It can be defined as a set of servers that are located in multiple data centers across the globe, responsible for distributing website content to provide a better website’s performance.
When a customer accesses your website at a distance from the web hosting, the middle server will be responsible for responding to the content which is closest to the user. The transmission distance will be reduced in a significant way for facilitating page loading, accessing the link, or downloading by the user.
You may choose to use a CDN free provided by Cloudflare or use a CDN which you have to pay for increasing the speed of your website of the website.
Benefits of Using CDN to The Speed of Website
Here are the most notable benefits of the website’s performance that the content delivery network (CDN) bring to increase the speed of website:
- CDN is the best choice for the speed of websites with increased traffic flow abruptly.
- CDNs are useful in reducing resource levels (such as disk and bandwidth) for your root server and increase the website’s performance.
- Connection latency is minimized by CDN.
- CDN brings about SEO benefits. Google has increased the speed of website loading into 1 in the SEO evaluation criteria. Accordingly, the faster the download speed, the SEO score will be higher and increase customer satisfaction of the website’s performance.
- CDN offers a faster browsing experience, significantly shorter download times especially when web users are near content delivery servers (CDN). Users will see that the website participation is correct when it’s speed is not too slow, the bounce rates will not increase significantly because people often want to stay away from a low-speed website. Your website contains great information and having fast downloads will always be the first choice of the user.
Speed up is one of the benefits that users are most interested in, in this article will guide you on how to use CDN to increase your speed of the website.
Steps to Install and Use CDN to Increase Website Speed
Step 1: Analyze Your Website’s CDN Performance
To check if your website is taking advantage of the CDN, you can use website analytics tools such as GTmetrix. Besides, there are many other tools such as Webpage Test, Pingdom Tools, Dotcom-Monitor, …
The test will give you the result. If your website has CDN installed, then try other ways to increase the speed of a website. If your website does not have CDN installed, please continue to follow to increase the speed of the website.
After accessing the website, enter the domain name of the website you want to check. The results of the website’s performance will appear on the screen.
Looking at the photos, you can see that the GretaThemes website takes full advantage of the effectiveness of CDN with static assets: 100/100. This is just to indicate that the files on your website are loaded via CDN or not. We will install the CDN for a website that does not have the support of CDN yet or with a low CDN score to raise the speed of the website if the grade is less than 80/100.
Step 2: Select an Appropriate CDN for Your Website
As mentioned above, there are two options at this step: you may choose to use a CDN free provided by Cloudflare or use a CDN which you have to pay for the speedup of the website.
If you are running a small website with moderate traffic, the free CDN version may be more than enough. However, if your traffic level is increasing and there is a sudden increase in the use of resources, a paid CDN would be a better option to raise the speed of the website.
Below, we will guide you to install the free CDN from Cloudflare because most websites use this free version and the operation is extremely simple and easy to understand.
Step 3: Set Up a CDN Cloudflare to Increase Speed
Sign Up for a Cloudflare Account
Signing up for Cloudflare is not difficult. You just need to access the homepage of Cloudflare, click Sign Up. Then, enter the Email and Password you want to use to register. The system will automatically send you an email to confirm your registration.
Add the Domain to Cloudflare
Follow the steps below to add Domains to Cloudflare:
1. After Login, in Cloudflare’s main interface, you select Add Site to add a new website in the system.
2. Enter your domain name, click Add Site.
Wait 1 minute for Cloudflare to scan all DNS of your domain to make sure that after setting up Cloudflare, your speed of the website will still work normally without any problems with DNS.
3. Select the service pack.
In the next step, Cloudflare provides us with different service packages such as Free, Pro, Business to Enterprise. Here, we only use the free service of Cloudflare so we will choose the free plan and click Confirm plan. Pro package upwards should only be used for these large websites which have a lot of traffic - users scattered all over the world because it is quite expensive to increase the speed of the website.
Confirm the DNS Records for Your Domain
After adding the Domain to CloudFlare, we confirm the step of DNS records for your domain name. At this step, a dialog box appears to help you confirm the records which correspond to your domain name.
It may appear that there is no record at all if the domain name has just been registered. This will be displayed by the yellow cloud icon. If not registered, it will show a grey cloud icon with a crossed out.
After reviewing, you click Continue to continue.
Point the Name Servers to Cloudflare
After selecting the Plan, CloudFlare will ask you to change the nameserver of your domain to Cloudflare's nameserver. If you do not change the nameserver, your CDN installation will not complete and Cloudflare service will not work to increase the speed of the website.
To adjust the nameserver, click the section named account that I point here (the account from the provider that you register the domain), then modify it. In this image, the name of the domain provider is Namecheap, but it’s different depending on the name of your provider.
After that, the system will change your nameserver.
Depending on your domain name provider, there will be different configurations for you. But basically it just changes the old nameserver to the new one of Cloudflare.
When you set up successfully, the screen will display like this.
When the operation is completed, click Done, check nameservers to finish. Updating Domain Name Servers information may take from a few minutes to 24 hours. After the update, large domain services usually take one hour to completely take effect. Then, when you log into Cloudflare, you will see your account is in Active Status and speed’s website will be improved.
Use the CDN of Cloudflare
When you set up successfully, the screen will display like this.
Check Your Changes Again
Once the CDN content distribution network has been set up, try analyzing it again with the GTMetrix to see if everything works as expected.
Bonus: These are a few more performance tweaks you can make to Cloudflare to increase your site speed and even security. If it's of interest, please read this article.
Use a Paid CDN to Speed Up Your Website
Cloudflare free CDN is good, but it's only suitable for small websites with low traffic. As mentioned above, if your speed of website traffic has increased, a paid CDN would be a better choice for your website speed. In addition to choosing Cloudflare's paid plans, you can also refer to some of our recommendations.
- MaxCDN and Jetpack are the best options if you are operating CMS websites (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, ..) which contain a lot of visual media to help speed’s website improve.
- RackSpace and CDN77 are suitable for video and streaming, which also increase the speed of your website.
- jsDeliver will be the appropriate CDN provider that you should look to if your site contains lots of JavaScript and you want to speed up your website.
Final Thought
Optimizing and speeding up WordPress websites is a good topic and there are many problems that need to be discussed. Of course, you should not put all your faith in the CDN. You still need to conduct other techniques to increase the speed of your website. For example: remove unused CSS and JS files or use plugins to speed up website like WPRocket to improve the website's performance. I hope the article has brought you useful information. And I hope your website will be loaded in less than 1 second!