CDN Speed Test

What is a Content Delivery Network?

Nobody likes it when a website loads for what seems to be forever. In fact, most people would choose to close the page if it takes more than a few seconds to load. In order to avoid that, most websites implement what is a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

CDN is the invisible backbone of the internet that allows to speed up website’s loading time. It is essentially a number of data centers dispersed around the world that store a cached copy of a website’s content to shorten the physical distance that data has to travel. Imagine someone from Australia trying access your website, whose hosting server is located in New York. It would take a long time for the data to travel from its stored location before finally reaching the end user.

The static files CDN servers host are usually videos, images, audio, as well as JavaScript and CSS files.

What are the Benefits of using a CDN?

• Latency is the amount of time it takes the host server to process the request and deliver resources. Simply said, it’s the website’s loading time and it depends on the proximity of a user to the host server. Seeing as CDN is a global network of data centers, this greatly decreases the latency.
• No more crashes due to traffic spikes. CDN reduces traffic load on the original server by routing the request to a proxy server. This also saves bandwidth, and hence, money.
• Better security. CDN not only can serve as a back-up of your most important content, but it’s designed to protect the data it stores and prevent any security breaches. CDN is excellent at detecting and averting DDoS attacks.
• Improved user satisfaction and experience. A website is judged not only by it’s interface, but also by how fast users can navigate through it.
• One of the criteria search engines use rank websites is loading time. When searching for something, people rarely get past the third page. Getting CDN helps your website get seen.

Why use Bootstrap Framework?

Twitter Bootstrap is a frontend framework, first developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter, and later on released as open-source in 2011. Usage of Bootstrap Framework for designing websites has rapidly increased in the last couple of years and continues to grow. According to the Builtwith.com, 20.4% of the most popular websites are built with Bootstrap, and it is especially trending in the Business domain.

Bootstrap is known for its responsive features, mobile-friendliness, comprehensive list of components and bundles of JavaScript plugins. All of the Javascript plugins depend on Jquery, the remainder of components require CSS and HTML.

While there are many readily available components, websites built with Bootstrap are as unique as their designers want them to be.

Why use Public CDNs?

There are a number of free public CDN services such as Google CDN, Microsoft CDN, MaxCDN and others. They offer an incredible amount of stored Javascript and CSS libraries. Most of them also contain plugins that are available in Bootstrap.

So let’s say a person visits a website that loads its JQuery libraries from MaxCDN. Then, when said person visits your website they already have the library saved in their browser’s cache and it won’t have to be downloaded again. Thus, it minimizes the loading time. This is one of the advantages of using public CDN.

When building a website, it is best that the static assets, such as JavaScript libraries or CSS content from public CDN, are “closer” to the end user. With that thought in mind, we’ve designed a tool that shows from which CDN the most popular libraries are downloaded faster.