Ultimate Joomla CDN Tutorial

Interested in adding a CDN to your Joomla site?
You are in the right place.

We have done the research and testing for adding a Content Delivery network to Joomla, with much sucess.  So much success that we created this guide.  We chose Joomla Hosting Reviews as a test site, because it gets consistent traffic, gets visitors from around the world, and is a site we use to test a lots of ideas.

• CDN Basics
• How to Add Joomla to a CDN
• Improved CDN Results

CDN Basics

What is a CDN and how does it work?

A CDN distributes static website elements (images, CSS, Javascript) to a network of servers worldwide.  This server network allows visitors to dowload your website from the servers that are closest to them. By using the closer/faster server the download time decreases, creating a better user experiences.

Typically CDN providers will has multiple servers on each continent.

Edgecast CDN Map

CDNs are used by most major sites including Joomla, Jelly Belly, and The Onion.

Learn more about Content Delivery Networks at Wikipedia

Who can benefit from a CDN?

• Websites with a Global visitor base
• High Traffic Wesites
• Webmasters wanting a fast website
• Webmasters wanting to improve Search Engine Results

CDN Providers

There are about a dozen or so CDN providers, most are geared to large sites with very large budgets. 

Whole Site CDN Providers

These are the top level providers with the most advanced technology for making dynamic or database driven sites fast.  They offer a high level of support and assistance.  Prices start at $1000/month

• Cotendo
• Akamai Technologies

Low cost CDN Providers (prices less than $300/month)

• Cachefly Plans start at $99/month
• Amazon Cloudfront
• Rochen (okay not a CDN provider, but they can get you on the Internap CDN)

Adding Joomla to a CDN

Joomla has two major areas that really benefit from a CDN:

1. Template Elements
2. Images folder

Template Elements

The template is pretty easy to add, open up your index.php file and update the location of the any template bacground images or logo.  This can also be done for any CSS or Javascript elements

Images Folder

Adding the Images folder is a little more involved.  Unlike the template file you could have hundreds of content items, components, and modules that call images from the /images/stories folder.  We want to update images location to the cdn autmatically with out any manual tranfer of files.  By updating automatically we are sure to get all of the images and not have to remember to update image locations in the future.

Image folder update options

• Rereplacer plugin
• CDN extenstions

Addtional Resources:

• If you use Rochen for hosting check out our Rochen Joomla CDN Install Guide

Improved CDN Results

Once we added Joomla Hosting Reviews to a CDN we saw results immediately.  Some of the results you can expect:

• Pages Load Quicker / Happy Wisitors
• Improved Yslow Scores
• Increased Global Traffic

Pages Load Quicker / Happy Visitors / Improved Conversions

Now that the content of the site is delivered from multiple servers the pages will loat quicker. Faster pages mean quite a few things:

• improve user experience
• improved sales & conversions
• improved placement in the Google Search Results

Here is an excellent article that goes into detail why fast page load times are important.

Site Performance According to Webmaster tools

Google Webmaster Tools Results
Sites Performance allows you to see how fast your site loads for your visitors.  Page load times are collected from visitors with Google Tool Bar installed and assembled and graphically displayed in webmaster tools. Learn more about Google Site Performance.

This is the graph that comes from Joomla Hosting Reviews which is run on one of Rochen's shared servers.  You can see that right around the time JoomlaHostingReviews.com was added to the CDN, the speed dipped into the Google Fast Range. Anytime you can get a site into the fast range you are doing pretty good.

WebWait Results
Webwait if a free tool that times your website (or your compettitors) to see how fast the pages load.

This is helpful because it tests the download time between your site and the web wait servers, removing the speed of you internet connection variable.  Giving you a more accurate estimation of your site speed.

When you pages load fast, visitors will be happier.  Amazon has been able to quantify this.

Increased Global Traffic

If you have (or hope to have) a global visitor base a CDN will really help.  This image was created from the Google Analytics.  We used the referring sites report and filtered for the word Google. A CDN was added to Joomla Hosting Reviews.com on June 21.  Around Juy 3 you can see an increase traffic around July 3.  No other major changes were made to the site.  So I think it is safe to attribute the increase in globak traffic to the CDN addition.

Note does not show the main Google.com results but rather the country specific google search results. As you can see

Improved Yslow Scores

For anyone who has used Yslow you know you can never get those last ten point for being on a CDN.  Well now you can. 

We had put a lot of time into streamlining the template, combining and caching the CSS and Javascript, and adding a Cache to the site.  After all of this work we were still in the 80s for YSlow.  After adding a CDN we were able to make it to 99!

The YSlow score is not the end all to be all but it is a good indication about how fast your site will load.  Faster sites get better results.