Speed Up Your WordPress Blog using MaxCDN
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is the latest trend to deliver the static content to the visitor’s browser by sending their request to a server located near to their geographical location.
This is from Wikipedia
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottlenecks near that server.
Configuring a wordpress blog to use a CDN in not a hard job if you know what to do. Though ItsAbhik does not use a CDN as almost all the static contents like images and javascripts are being served from a static and cookieless domain (I’ll write a post later on how I did that). However, it helps to bring down the server load and reduce the page load time by 50% by serving the content from a remote server.
Setting up a CDN
First you need to choose a CDN service (my recommendation is MaxCDN). It is one of the best Origin Pull CDN service available (yes, keeping amazon cloudfront and S3 in mind).
maxcdn.jpg" alt="Below are the steps to create a zone and activate your CDN.
- Once you log in to your MaxCDN dashboard, go to Manage Zones > Create Pull Zone
- In this page, you will need to enter the zone details.
- Pull Zone Name: Give your pull zone a name. This should be unique and minimum 3 characters long.
- Origin Server URL: This is your blog URL. Including http:// and the trailing slash (“/”)
- Custom CDN Domain: It is optional, but you can use a subdomain for better branding.
- Label: Enter a little description of your pull zone. Keep it as minimum as possible
- Compression: Check the box to enable gzip compression of the output. It helps to save bandwidth and increase the pageload speed.
Now click on Create. Once the zone is successfully created, there will be a message saying that you need to setup a CNAME for your custom CDN domain.
- Now go to your hosting control panel and create the subdomain you used as the Custom CDN Domain and add the CNAME record to it. Remember, the CNAME propagation might take up to 24 hours.Do not proceed farther if the CNAME is not fully propagated worldwide.
- It is time to setup your blog to use the CDN. We will use the W3 Total Cache wordpress plugin to take care of this. Manually doing the setup will take a lot of time and we might end up screwing up the blog.
- Download the W3 Total Cache plugin from WordPress Plugin Repository. Login to your WordPress Admin Dashboard and go to Plugins > Add New > Upload. Upload the zip file of the W3 Total Cache and activate it. This will add a settings group named “Performance” at the left sidebar of your wordpress admin dashboard.
- Go to Performance > General Settings” Scroll down and enable the CDN. Choose “Mirror: NetDNA/MaxCDN” as the CDN Type. Click of Save Changes. You can disable all other settings like minifying, caching etc. if you do not intend to use them.
- Now go to Performance > CDN. Check all the boxes at General Settings if available (Host Minified Files checkbox might be disable if you disabled the CSS and JS minifying from settings). Enter the API ID and API Key from your MaxCDN dashboard. Leave the SSL support to “Auto”. Enter your subdomain that you used as your Custom CDN Domain at step 2. Click on Save Changes.
Your CDN is ready and should now be serving your static contents. You can check it by viewing the URL of your theme images, CSS and JS files. They should be coming from your custom CDN domain.
You can also check the how to integrate maxcdn with wordpress using w3 total cache plugin created by me..
Go to MaxCDN | W3 Total Cache
