I was somewhat skeptical of CDN (Content Delivery Network) services such as Cachefly, MaxCDN and AmazonCloud. They are not exactly cheap, except for MaxCDN with a price tag of $39 per month. It was then that I decided to give CDN a try and I have to admit that the speed is amazing, a quick check with Pingdom’s Full Page Test shows an increase of 1 to 2 seconds in total loading time.

You may be wondering the difference it makes if a page loads by 1 second. Well, according to Google, Yahoo and Amazon. Speed is among the most significant success factors web sites face. In fact, your site’s speed directly affects your income (revenue) — it’s a fact. Some high traffic sites conducted research and uncovered the following:

• Google.com: +500 ms (speed decrease) -> -20% traffic loss [1]
• Yahoo.com: +400 ms (speed decrease) -> -5-9% full-page traffic loss (visitor left before the page finished loading) [2]
• Amazon.com: +100 ms (speed decrease) -> -1% sales loss [1]

From my own experience, there is an increase in pageviews and revenue, not so much in new traffic because it takes a few months for Google to update their database. All in all, I have no regrets subscribing to a CDN, the only regret I had was not to take part in this CDN thing earlier. Here are the summary:

• Revenue increased
• Bounce rate dropped
• Pageviews increased
• Faster loading time

Currently I am using MaxCDN, based on the speed test from Cloud Harmony, AmazonCloud is the fastest but the setup is kind of confusing, so was CacheFly. MaxCDN uses Pull Zone instead of Push Zone like CacheFly and Amazon, therefore with a simple WordPress plugin such as W3 Total Cache, everything sorted out by the plugin with minor editing.

Depending on your Budget, you might want to try Amazon. Good Luck.

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