Using MaxCDN has Turbocharged my Web Sites

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Google’s Pagespeed recommend using a CDN to reduce load times, but ignored it for whatever reasons.

I finally bit the bullet and signed up for MaxCDN’s service, then implemented it on 2 of my websites.

The first website was VAGunTrader, where the traffic is very high ( approximately 4 million pageviews per month ).  The posts are rich in photos / images and there was a ton of Bandwidth being consumed as people viewed the items that were in the For Sale sections. As soon as the custom CNAME was created and resolved ( took approximately 5 minutes. yes, it was that easy! ), the page load times went down.

Not only was I caching jpgs, pngs and gifs ( images ), but I also decided to have the css and js files served from the CDN as well.

My server couldn’t have been more happy!

As a follow on, I also noticed users staying on the site longer, from viewing the Google Analytics data. The bounce rate went down and the pages per visit went up, all without doing anything to change the website’s design.

All due to MaxCDN, serving up cached static files.

After this initial success, I then decided to see how easy it was to implement a CDN in my WordPress installation on this site. End result: Easy peasy!

I use WP Super Cache as my caching plugin of choice and there is a CDN tab, where I simply entered the cdn.sirdude.com url and it ‘just worked’.

Check out MaxCDN for yourself!