Site Speed up, going to try Content Delivery Network.

[TransAmDan]

Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site?s static file throughs hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them. They get a great site experience and you get a site that loads faster and ranks better in the search engines.

Our website is hosted in London, but if there was more servers serving the user the files it could speed it up quite a bit. I'm going to give it ago in the next couple of hours, so if the site has down time you know why.

However it should all run smooth. lol, as if anything is that straight forward.

 

[TransAmDan]

Well this is partially implemented at the moment. Need to do some fancy tricks with DNS to finalise it. At the moment I've change the URL certain area point to and the caching for our site is working.
Basically there are servers around the world which hold parts of our website, like images etc.. Depending on which server is closest (fastest), it will serve the data from that one. While the main content, like forum test is served directly from our own webserver.

It appears to be working. I can bypass everything I've done, by unticking a few boxes now, so if it plays up, I have a quick way out.

 

[TransAmDan]

One the page has been loaded it seem to load quicker the next time.
I notice some avatars went missing so I have turned that bit off.

In general has it improved things? Are are people seeing issues?

 

[Darren]

Not noticed any issues :thumbup1:

 

[TransAmDan]

I got the idea of using CDN from a few forum I've been reading.
One of my aims was to get visitors to the site. This mainly happened from word of mouth, or from a search in the search engines.
To be found in the search engines, you need to have certain words on the page in a particular place. For some of this tuning there is a plub in for the forum called VBSEO, the forum is pretty poor search engine wise without it.
So with this VBSEO plug in, we have more chance of being found and more visitors.
No, using a google speed check, our pages were loading slow. Some of this is inherent using VBulletin, as it uses soo many calls to the database. However some of the calls are to client side java scripts and images.
Well to speed up this files delivered, for images and javascript, we use an external cache. Called a content delivery network. This means that our images etc... are stored at various places around the world. This took a bit of time to sort out.
Maxcdn/vbseo setup - vBulletin SEO Forums After reading this article I signed up for MAXCDN, this article explained how to set it up, the cost was good. So I'm pretty pleased at the moment.
I mentioned earlier about the DNS changes, I implemented these at around 10pm last night, as it took time for the DNS records to propagate around the world.
Many elements of the site are serves from these other servers now.
The core running of the site, like the database are only on our server. This cannot be cached, the only things that can be cached are items that can be called up in your internet browser. Infact your browser has some caching feature too.

Now our page speed has sped up. :heh:

There are other ways to make the page faster like CSS Sprites. CSS is a cascading style sheet. On the loading of the page there is a few style sheets being called up. Merging into one will help, but the thing is, on the forum page, there is about 10 different images. So this is taking 10 calls to the server. These images can be in one file, and in the CSS has co-ordinates of where to cut out parts of the image to make your individual imaged.

Setting myself many challenges along the way.