Having a website that loads faster is essential for great user experience. Many big and small hosting provider offer this service to their customers, but how do you make sure that you are really getting what you are paying for ? Are your users really experiencing faster page loads with a CDN ?
Lets start by understanding what a CDN is and how it works :
CDN integration helps load your content faster by mainly doing following- Terminate incoming connections from your users at data center physically closer to them, thereby reducing TCP and TLS connection overhead time dramatically.
- Cache and serve static cacheable content closer to users so that it can be served quickly, this includes static html, css, javascript, images, fonts, videos etc.
How do I know it works for me ?
- Scale and working of a CDN might be overwhelming for an average user let alone finding out if it has been effectively deployed for your website.
- Best way to measure that effectiveness of your CDN integration is to see how your users see it !
- This involves measuring your website load times wherever your users are, don't worry you don't have to get machines there , It has been already done for you !
- Head to https://prober.tech/ and put the resource you want to test in the URL box. All times reports here are in millisecond.
- This information is also available in tabular format for quick access / sorting
- Looking at these numbers , total time taken to the main page for cloudflare.com appears uniform almost everywhere on the globe , which tells me that company that runs CDN for its customers also happened to have enabled it for their own website :)
Now let's look at the numbers for a site that I've hosted in Virginia, USA. In this example as you move physically away from the website (Virginia ) load times keep increasing. This is symptom of a website being served from one fixed physical location and doesn't have a CDN enabled.
Conclusion
With https://prober.tech/ you can measure your websites / resources load times from across the globe and get sense of how fast your users in or near those area perceive your website to be.
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