Improving the performance of a website, is CDN really necessary?

https://youtu.be/VY6B_F3gUT4

We would all like to snap our fingers and, as Mary Poppins managed to do, magically improve the performance of our website.

Unfortunately this is not the case, there are no tools that magically do what we should do in a structured way.

Why am I telling you this? Because the first thing found among the advice on the web is the activation of a CDN.

Activate a CDN to improve the performance of your website.

But do you know what a CDN is and what it is for?

I'll try to explain it to you in a simple way.

Imagine that your hosting service and therefore the server that provides your website is in Italy, more precisely in Turin.

Now, think about who your visitors are, are they Italian? Well.

When your visitors browse the website, they download the contents from the server located in Turin, if they are Italian users the latency times between their home/office and the server will be in the order of 40-60ms

What happens with an active CDN?

It happens that when the visitor opens the site, instead of downloading the contents from the origin server (the one in Turin) he downloads them from an EDGE server owned by the CDN which is usually located in the place closest to the user.

In "small" countries like Italy, the EDGE servers of the most famous CDNs are usually located in Milan or Rome.

It follows that the increase in speed is practically zero, because the distances are absolutely irrelevant and indeed, from some tests carried out, in 80% of cases there is a slowdown, because if it is true that the static contents are served by the EDGE server, this does not happen for the dynamic ones which have to do an extra HOP.

In a test run on a WordPress site before and after activating a CDN, we lost less than 300ms in page load time.

The question changes, however, if the traffic to your website is mainly made up of foreign users and your origin server remains the one in Turin.

In this specific case the improvements can also be important and therefore we recommend the use of a CDN.

Is your website hosted in Italy and are your visitors Italian? You do NOT need a CDN, do not activate it, you will almost certainly increase the latency and the level of complexity in troubleshooting in case of problems.

Is your website hosted in Italy and you have 80% of foreign users? YES activate a CDN.

However, remember that the best way to improve performance is to work on the site template.

Use our free tool SPEED to start measuring and improving your performance, I leave you below the links to previous vlogs on the topic:

Web Performance and SEO SPEED: Analysis of Network Requests How to measure the speed of a website and share the results – SPEED How to improve the speed of a website – SPEED

Good work and see you in the next video! Oh I forgot, did you know that if you sign up and activate the bell, YouTube will notify you when we publish a new video?