Google recently announced that site speed has been added to the signals that they use in their ranking algorithms. Site speed is currently only factored in on google.com if the search is performed in the English language. The new signal has been added to the algorithm a few weeks ago (some webmasters say as early as mid January) and is affecting about 1 in 100 search results pages.
The general consensus is to not panic if the rankings did not take a dive in the last couple weeks. Google, as always, is not revealing most of the information that webmasters need to analyze the new situation. It is not clear how the site speed is calculated only that several factors are used to calculate it.
Webmasters do have options to speed up their websites and one of these options is a content distribution network. Most websites are hosted on one server (alone or with other websites, does not really matter). The geographic location of that server is one factor that determines the time it takes for visitors to display the website in their browsers. This is usually faster for users in the same country and slower for users from other continents.
A CDN counters this by providing access to the contents from several servers in different locations in the world. Ghacks for instance is hosted in the USA. US citizens, Canadians and Mexicans can retrieve elements from the website faster than users from Europe or Australia. The content distribution network uses servers in Europe and Asia to speed up site access for users from those continents.
We have just enabled a CDN here at Ghacks and would like to ask anyone to report problems and errors (and positive messages as well) so that we can find bugs and problems if they should exist.
Webmasters who are interested in a how to setup a cdn are also welcome to voice their opinion.
Related Articles:
Google Adds Site Speed To Web Search Ranking AlgorithmLoad Google+ Button Asynchronously For Faster Loading Times
Find Out which Website Loads Faster
Google Adds Site Health To Webmaster Tools
Allowed sites now available for Adsense Webmasters
Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ using the icons below.
Any tutorial.. how to implement CDN on wordpress.
Here’s what the source says:
Content Delivery Network via Amazon Web Services: CloudFront: cdn.ghacks.net
From what I gather, they’re using W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress and pointing it at the CDN through Amazon Web Services, a paid service.
Jason you are right. I have prepared an article that explains how we set it up. It should be obvious that a CDN does cost money as someone has to pay the bandwidth bill. The article is currently under review and will be posted tomorrow.
Nicely done!
good job ..cdn will definitely improve the speeds and the ranking.. how is the pricing ?? what is the % increase in ur budget for hosting?