Contributed by Eric Bryant, SEO specialist, Gnosis Arts
One of the ways to help decrease website load time and improve website performance is by the use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). A CDN is a service that hosts certain web elements and objects, such as images, video or audio, and serves up those images to your website. CDNs are often effective because they are a network of servers which caches large portions of your website throughout the entire network. This way, the end user is receiving your website from the nearest location possible to him or her, rather than having to go out to your web server to retrieve your website, thereby speeding up the time it takes to load your website into a browser.
One drawback of a CDN is price. CDNs can be very expensive, and are often outside the budget range of small business websites. However, there is one free CDN service we want to make you aware of.
The Coral Content Delivery Network
The Coral Content Delivery Network is found at coralcdn.org. This is a free service. Coral works in two primary ways. The first is by appending “.nyud.net” to the end of any URL. This activates Coral’s proxy server networks. They cache your web page in their network, and then subsequently each time that URL is requested, it is served up from the Coral CDN network instead of your origin web server. This will sometimes decrease that page’s load time.
We tried this version, but honestly found it wanting. Appending “.nyud.net” to the end of our web pages didn’t enhance the performance of our website. On the contrary, it actually slowed them down. Although we are still testing it out, our SEO team surmises that the reason for the slowdown is due to the fact that we already optimized our site’s load time quite significantly via .htaccess, GZIP and OpenDNS methods, prior to utilizing the Coral CDN. Too many different DNS systems handling requests, we think, has the opposite of the intended effect.
The Second Application of Coral CDN
So, we tried the second version. The second way of using Coral CDN is to prepend “http://coralize.net/” to your web page. For example, if your URL is www.domain.com, then to use the Coral CDN, you would attach http://coralize.net to the front of the original URL: http://coralize.net/http://www.domain.com.
We tried this method for a few web pages, but the response time was really no better.
Then we tried “Coralizing” only certain HTML objects instead of entire HTML pages. We chose relatively large objects, such as audio (.mp3) and large image (.jpg, .gif) files. And Bingo! We struck gold!
Conclusion: CDNs Work Best on Objects, not Entire Pages
Our conclusion is that utilizing CDNs can help decrease load time, but not always. In fact, for sites which load sufficiently fast, A CDN may not help at all. Relying too heavily on them will actually work against you. When we used CDN delivery on entire web pages, we found an increase in load time. Not the desired effect.
However, when we used the CDN to deliver only large object elements, such as .mp3, .avi or Flash files, we noticed a substantial improvement in load time.
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