FASTER FASTER FASTER! A while back I was finishing up my latest website project and was pretty proud of the website I had built.
The design was good; the content was good, titles just right, pages, posts, images€¦ check, check, check.
I thought to myself €awesome€ this is the best website I had done. So, near the end during the testing phase I noticed that the websites loading speed was a little sluggish. It wasn't horrible but wasn't great either.

So I went back and did a little more images optimizing to see if that would make a difference. Nope.

What's the point of having a great website if it takes too long to load? There had to be a solution.

I weighed the options - altering the design to have fewer images, purchasing better/faster hosting plan as well as some other ones. Since this website was done on WordPress I tried a plugin called €W3 Total Cache'.w3 total cache The plugin allows you to make changes to how your website loads (among other things) but I'm not going to get into the details of this plug in in this article. Check out the wordpress.org website to see all the things it can do. While speaking to a friend about the W3 Plug in they suggested taking advantage of the section that uses a CDN. €What's a CDN?€ The acronym stands for Content Delivery Network.

Without getting into a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo - it's a service that puts parts of your website on various servers around the world so there is a shorter distance from a requesting computer to a receiving computer. In more plain language it speeds up the downloading of your website. So I asked how much did it cost? It turns out that there are several providers out there like MaxCDN, Fastly, and Akamai etc. with different pricing models and features but there was at least one that was no charge- Cloudflare.com

CloudFlare CDN

There are a few settings you need to change in your hosting admin panel but not too difficult for the average user. So I signed up for an account and connected the website to it.

WOW - what a difference! surprised1bNow I can't credit ALL the speediness to Couldflare (remember I am using it in conjunction with the W3 Total Cache plugin.) but the website loaded much faster than it had previously. So if you're looking for a FASTER FASTER FASTER downloading website consider using a CDN as part of your attack on slothiness (is that even a word?)