Drupal 8 CDN integration for website speed

Much has been said about the importance of discovering your customers’ tastes and giving them what they expect. Their tastes differ, but there’s something common to them all. No matter if they enjoy pizza with mozzarella or with seafood, they would like to have it delivered fast, and they will open the fragrant box impatiently. Similarly, all your website’s users, irrespective of their choices, enjoy good loading speed. Give it to them! In addition to improving your caching, minifying your files, moving your JS and CSS to the footer, we suggest you consider CDN integration and discover the tool that implements it on your Drupal website.

CDN and what it does for website performance optimization

“Margherita and Quattro Stagioni please.” Do not keep your customers waiting! If you had a pizzeria chain, you would most certainly deliver pizza to your clients from the points that are nearest to them.

The basic laws of logistics and marketing apply in the IT world as well. However, seconds and milliseconds matter here. Thankfully, there are content delivery networks, or CDNs for short, to help with this. These worldwide networks of proxy servers are meant to quickly deliver content to users. This includes images, fonts, videos, CSS and JS files and more. The moment a website appears on users’ screen comes significantly faster.

Since the delivery speed depends on the user’s proximity, the content delivery networks store the cached versions of content in multiple geographical locations and use the closest ones for every visitor. For example, if your website is hosted in Europe, your American guests can get the locally stored content delivered to them much faster.

Drupal website CDN integration with the Drupal 8 CDN module

If you have a Drupal site, Content Delivery Network integration can be done with the special Drupal 8 CDN module. What it does is changing the URLs of your files to set the place they should be loaded from. This place will be a CDN, not your web server.

Drupal 8 CDN module: installation and configuration hints

• First, install the Drupa 8 CDN module and enable it on your Drupal website.

• Next, go to the module’s configuration page.
• On the “General settings” tab, you can select the module’s status — enable, disable it, or use the testing mode. In addition, if you check the “Display statistics” setting, users with special permissions will see how much content is delivered from the CDN.
• The “Details” tab will give you more options. In the first place, make sure to select “Origin Pull.” In addition, use the “CDN mapping” setting, where you give the URL of your CDN and specify which files (or files with which extensions) should be loaded via the content delivery network.
• The “Far Future Expiration” setting will additionally improve client-side cacheability by making sure that all files that are delivered from the CDN expire in the far future. In this case, you will also need to have the “Aggregate and compress CSS files” option enabled in the Performance settings.
• In the “Other” tab, select “CDN supports HTTPS,” if your Drupal site uses HTTPS and your CDN supports it as well.

To recap

Organize your own fast content delivery for your customers and let them enjoy the speed! In today’s Web, it’s the best way to gain their respect and loyalty, whatever their tastes are. Drudesk is ready to perform Drupal CDN integration for you, as well as test the result. Your Drupal website’s speed can be much higher, and we will prove it!