Benefits of using MaxCDN with CloudFlare
Speeding up your website can be done in many ways. This includes reducing requests made to the server, optimizing graphics, and structuring your document correctly. What I’m going to cover today includes using a CDN to serve content like images, style sheets, and JavaScript. CloudFlare works a bit differently, it’s basically an advanced firewall that protects and speeds up your site. Using the two together can have a tremendous effect on you and your visitors with a noticeable difference before and after.
What is MaxCDN and why use it?
MaxCDN is a very popular and powerful content delivery network. I wouldn’t have said any old CDN if I didn’t think this one is worth it. It made a noticeable difference in my site speed with local servers around the world to ensure it has the best effect. They also have a great deal, they give you 1TB of storage for a year and the price is $39.95, but even if that’s still too much, you can use ‘wpbeginner’ as a promo code to get 25% off. price for what it’s probably worth. There are many benefits, they have shared SSL and give you your own temporary domain for the path to the files. You can use that or create a subdomain and then use a CNAME in your DNS records to point to the temporary URL.
push and pull zones
There are two types of zones you can create once you have everything up and running. Push zones and pull zones are different and have their own advantages and disadvantages. Pull zones work like this: A user accesses a file, if it hasn’t been accessed before, MaxCDN has to upload the original and cache it on their servers. Once this is done, it usually stays cached, so it only lags a bit the first time. Push zones are a bit different and can also be more expensive. You upload all the content to their servers and then it is served from there. This means there will be no delays in loading content and most CMS plugins can do this automatically. Although push zones are typically used for larger files like video and audio, I suggest using a pull zone because it’s easier and more affordable.
What is CloudFlare and what does it do?
CloudFlare is a free service and it does a lot to empower your site and keep it better protected. For starters, it replaces your nameservers with the ones provided by CloudFlare so your data stays anonymous, you need to do this for the service to work. Once they have control over your domain, it performs a variety of tasks to ensure that your visitor never has to sit and wait for your site to load again. Caches resources, has a new beta feature to minify your HTML, CSS and JS if you haven’t already, Pro version can preload other pages before you go to them so they appear instantly, can manage Google Analytics integration and has hotlink protection for your images. That barely covers half of what CloudFlare can do if you already find it interesting.
The main feature is its advanced firewall feature that challenges dubious visitors with a catch code page and blocks certain people from automatically accessing the website. How does it do this? Well, everyone who uses CloudFlare powers it, so when other people have problems with certain visitors, like spam, everyone else knows about it and automatically challenges that person. You can block certain people yourself and even scramble email addresses or phone numbers on the site to greatly reduce spam. You’re always online, even if your website’s server is down, CloudFlare will make sure the site still works for them and does all of this seamlessly.
Use of services together and how
So CloudFlare speeds up my site by caching resources and managing complex security tasks behind the scenes, and MaxCDN acts as the content delivery network with servers conveniently located for media to load at blazing-fast speeds. The end result can be quite fantastic by upgrading your security and increasing upload speeds, ending up with a boost in Google rankings. It probably sounds complicated to implement, but all of this can be done in less than 5 minutes or so.
If you are using WordPress with W3 Total Cache, it would be very convenient to set it up, all you need to do is specify the CDN to be MaxCDN and it will bring up a preset list of fields to fill in. The API ID, key, and hostname are the primary ones, with the hostname being either the temporary URL you were given, or the subdomain with the CNAME record pointing to it. This causes all specified media, images, scripts, and stylesheets to be loaded from that URL instead of the normal one. If you use testing tools like PageSpeed and find that some are not using them, you may need to change these links manually, although this is usually done without your realizing it.
Setting up CloudFlare is even easier, scroll down to the CloudFlare area and just enter your account email, API key, domain and save. You may notice that the two services use an API to make everything work better for you. The MaxCDN API allows you to automatically purge content and upload files if you are using an embed zone. So even if you blog often, your images auto-upload with ease. On the other hand, you can activate development mode which disables the cache temporarily so that you can debug and develop whatever you’re working on before it’s finished. There is also a purge button next to it to remove all the content they have saved for your website.
Does it really work?
I would suggest using an online service like Webpage Test to monitor the time your website takes to load content with graphs to show details of each individual resource and optimization information along with ratings for using a CDN and other tasks. If you are unfortunately not using WordPress and are using another CMS, there are a wide variety of options and plugins available at your disposal. Try doing a before and after test to see if it makes a real difference because if it doesn’t, MaxCDN offers a 30-day money-back guarantee just in case the service isn’t for you. They have a great support service. Good luck getting your sites up to speed in today’s fast-paced world.