Do I really need cdn?

Markds

n00b
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Feb 22, 2015
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Hey guys who know can you please answer.

I'm searching for a CDN service to use with my wordpress blog to improve blog’s google pagespeed score and serve web pages faster to visitors, etc. I found this one and want try free trial. Is it the truth that CDN helps to load the content faster in blogs by taking care of static files in a website?
Do I still need a CDN with vps?:confused:

Thanks in advance.
 
Google provides a number of popular javascript libraries on their CDN for free: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide

So if all you're using is something like jQuery or AngularJS it's not going to cost you anything.

I honestly don't think CDNs are particularly important for smaller-scale operations, it's all dependant on how fast your webserver is and how geographically diverse your users are. Using something like Google CDN for Javascript can help too because a lot of other websites also use Google's CDN so users won't need to download the libraries multiple times. If you're using some random CDN company, that advantage goes away.

If you haven't already set up a cache plugin for WordPress that's the first thing I'd do to improve performance. I've had good experiences with WP Super Cache before but there are plenty of options. These prevent WordPress from having to recreate the page every time a user loads it. Something like WordPress where most of the time it's serving the same page over and over to multiple clients really benefits from caching.
 
Most modern browsers limit the number of simultaneous requests from a single remote host name while loading a web page. The limit in browsers like Chrome, Firefox and IE is 6 concurrent downloads from the same domain. The purpose of this limit is to avoid overloading the remote server with concurrent requests. As such, offloading what you can to various CDNs such as google for scripts, and another for images can definitely help decrease the time it takes to fully render a page.
 
I agree with everything Quix said, and would add (without having seen your blog) that you should take care to bundle & minify your scripts as much as possible, to reduce HTTP round trips.
 
Try CloudFlare. Even though they don't host physical files, they will cache files, I've seen good speed improvements.
 
I agree with cnick79. Give CloudFlare a try... I have all my personal sites sitting behind them. It's quick and easy.

Also.. .a CDN isn't going to help a ton unless you fully adopt it(including images, js, css)... even then a caching solution like CloudFlare or Varnish is going to be a much larger improvement.

Our site has on average 500-800 concurrent users... with bursts well over 1000 depending on the time of the year. Right now I am not running a CDN for it(which will change once I move it out of our datacenter and into AWS)... However, I have two Varnish servers caching everything in-front of my Apache backends. With the Varnish servers even our image heavy homepage has a sub 1 second total load time... subpages are closer to 500ms.

TLDR; Look into caching if you want a real improvement.
 
Have you already turned on compression?

Have you already tuned cache settings in your response headers?

Indeed, things can load faster from a CDN because browsers try to be polite and don't send so many concurrent requests. You can make your own CDN by having additional hosts that service static-ish content; that helps because user agents will make more concurrent connections.
 
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