If you have a WordPress website that is visited by people from all over the world, having a CDN service can be very beneficial. This is especially true if your website has a lot of assets, such as JavaScript, CSS, and image files. These assets can slow down your website’s load time, making it frustrating for users. In this article, we will examine why CDNs are important and how they can improve your website’s performance.
To demonstrate the benefits of a CDN, we will use Pingdom Tools to benchmark our website’s load time with and without a CDN. For this experiment, we will use CDN77.com for our tech/video games site, which has a size of 2.4MB and more than 95 requests. Without a CDN, our website’s load time is around 2.64 seconds when accessed from a server in San Jose, California. However, when accessed from a server in Stockholm, Sweden, the load time increases to 5.20 seconds.
With CDN77 enabled, the first load time may actually increase slightly because the CDN needs to retrieve assets from the origin server and load them from the closest location. However, on subsequent loads, the load time decreases significantly. When accessed from outside the US, our website’s load time decreases from 5.20 seconds to 2.34 seconds with CDN77 enabled.
The graph above shows how CDNs can improve performance based on where your website is located and where your readers/customers are accessing it from. If your readers are accessing your website from the same country as your server, a CDN may not make much of a difference. However, if your readers are accessing your website from outside the country, a CDN can improve load times by up to 2X.
In conclusion, having a CDN on your international website is a must if you care about performance and your readers/customers are located around the world. It can significantly speed up your WordPress website and ease the bandwidth requirements on your server. However, managing the service properly is important to ensure its performance. In our next article, we will examine how to properly configure the CDN77 service with WordPress and take the most out of it. Don’t forget to check out our post on the best free CDN services out there to choose the one that best works for you.
