Look Ma, No CDN!
Look Ma, No CDN!
CDNs are common - but are they really necessary? Is a single origin the performance pitfall many think it is?
Yeah, it's always a bit weird to see companies using CDNs to push down page load times, but then their mostly static site is implemented with an SPA framework or such.
I guess, it doesn't matter for SEO how long it takes to render, does it?
It matters a little bit - Google measures performance on real devices through CrUX, and that feeds into their rankings - but not much. There's no real incentive to go for a Lighthouse performance score above 80 or so.
Agreed. I’m an SEO and I haven’t seen meaningful ranking adjustment by fixing page speed scores myself, but others may depending on the competition level and niches.
It’s meant more as a minor signal and a tie breaker. If SEO is roughly the same for two competing companies but one has page speeds of 2 second load times and the other 5 second, then the 2 second load time page may get a bump above the other 5 second one.
Now, I say MAY because there’s a lot that goes into it and maybe one brand has better on page conversion rates over the other one or something else that might affect things.
In my experience, the web application firewall product most cdn's offer is typically more valuable. Even then, only for transactional web pages.
Depends on the content. My employers sites are a good mix of images, static, and dynamic content, and we rely heavily on Akamai. Their caching of our images offloads a huge amount of work from our origins. We also use their Image Manager tool to optimize a lot of the images seamlessly, which adds further optimization. Their WAF and other security tools are also very impressive.
I'm familiar with their suite... Image Manager does offload a great deal. The real powerful offering they have is API security.
Meanwhile one of my projects is running my own caching CDN for my sites(personal not production)
That sounds fun! Have you written about it?
I thought the point of a CDN is that its available at edge locations. Do you have multiple servers geographically dispersed? If so, can you explain what else makes it a CDN?
Sorry if my comment comes off as snarky, when I read it, it sounds like that, but I promise it is not my intention!
All good. I do, I have 2 geographically separated load balancers that do edge caching for images on my screenshot site. The 2 load balancers are anycasted(I have my own ARIN address space) so clients are routed to the nearest PoP based on AS Path. Maybe one day I'll add more PoPs but I only setup 2 as otherwise it'll get kinda expensive for my personal screenshot website for little to no gain. It was mainly a, I want to setup my own CDN, rather than anything practical. I will say, when loading the home page while signed in you can SEE the load time differences in the cached images vs private images which are flagged to bypass the edge cache so it does work.
This is a great article, not gonna lie
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