When it comes to your website, speed matters. In fact, Amazon and Google both found that even very small delays in page load time could result in substantial revenue drops. (In the case of Google, a half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic and revenue.)

Now consider that 80% of the page load time is spent downloading all the components of the page, such as: images, stylesheets, scripts and more, and the impact that speeding this process could have on your overall site speed.

One way to quicken this process is to deliver content from servers that are geographically closer to the site visitor, and a content delivery network (CDN) can help you do just that.

Essentially, CDNs enable you to offload your static content – assets that do not require the rendering of code, for example: images, CSS files and java script files – to a series of geographically dispersed servers. In doing so, you’re improving accessibility of the content for your site visitors, from anywhere on the globe.

This is an ideal solution for high-volume online retailers.

A Client Example

For example, for one client engagement, we built a content-driven ecommerce site using Magento, and integrated CDN along with full-page caching. This drastically improved page load time, even for those with large amounts of content and rich media assets (particularly, in this case, videos).

The CDN has helped protect us against spikes in traffic due to paid ad campaigns and promotions because of the inherent scalability and stability of the CDN, as well as our use of it to caching not only media, JavaScript and CSS but also every static page on the site – including product detail pages, promotional pages and main landing pages.

While there are some Magento modules available that facilitate integration with a CDN, these require some software modifications, additional configuration and testing.  We elected instead to do total site caching, directing all non-secure traffic to the CDN so it acts as a site proxy - serving cached content and passing through requests for dynamic content to our Magento front-end servers.

This is a great option because Magento has a very flexible site URL configuration, which allowed us to do this without any modifications to code, or installation of any new third-party software or modules.

Visitors to this client’s site are benefiting from improved experiences and load times because we used CDN to strip out the unnecessary reliance on Magento code prior to checkout.

Have you had success in using a CDN to improve your site’s performance? What best practices have you learned from the build? What increase in speed are you seeing?