Speed up Joomla with a CDN
We already discussed that a CDN can work great for your site performance. The idea is that your static files, like CSS, Javascript and especially images are not just loaded from wherever your webserver is hosted, but from several datacenters around the world. This ensures that if your wesite is hosted in New York, a user in Singapore can still load the website pretty fast.
Last weekend we decided to implement a CDN for the Joomla-SEO.net website, let me share my findings. We used the #NoNumber plugin CDN for Joomla, combined with the service
It was pretty easy to implement the service. Here is what I did:
Sign up for MaxCDN
I chose to use because they have a good reputation, setting up is really easy, and they are not expensive. Also they have a page on their site .
First, sign up for a MaxCDN account (you can sign up with a ). Then, from the console, click on Zones in the menu. You can set-up multiple types of zones, but for the plugin we will be using we need Pull Zones, which is the first option available anyhow. Then click on Create a Pull Zone. This will open a screen where we can start filling in the data for your website.
There are just a few parameters to fill in:
- Pull Zone Name: Just a short name, related to your site
- Origin server URL: The full URL of your website, inluding the http://
- Compression: This switches on G-zip compression for the content on the CDN, switch it on.
There are optional parameters to set a "Custom CDN Domain", but you only need those if you want a pretty URL for the content in the source of your site. For now, we don't fill it in. Just click the Create button. This will now create the pull zone, while also "pulling" all available static content / files from your website to the CDN servers around the world.
Once you have finished, a CDN URL will be created in your overview, like xxxxxxxxx.netdna-cdn.com". This is what you need for the Joomla plugin.
If you want, you can also add more advanced parameters for caching, hotlinking, etc., but these settings are all optional.
NoNumber plugin "CDN for Joomla"
Now the easies way to configure your website to use the CDN is to download the NoNumber CDN for Joomla plugin. I used the Pro-version, but the free version works just as great for most sites. This is really easy:
Install the plugin, go to the Plugin Manager and look up System - NoNumber CDN for Joomla!.
Fill in the earlier recorded CDN URL. You can finetune which files you actually want to be loaded from the CDN, but I usually leave these at their defaults, unless I encounter issues. Now save the parameters, and check if you see any improvements. This website already loaded pretty quick, but it seemed I gained another 25%. Website speed measured with Pingdom.com showed that the site now loads in just under 0.6 seconds....
Not bad eauh?
By the way, you can set up a CDN with MaxCDN for a discounted price overhere, using coupon code max20: