Your website’s performance or speed is one of the factors that decides your ranking in search engines. Website that loads quickly also improves user experience and helps build loyal readership.
Improved site speed is also a good SEO practice. Google as well as Yahoo! suggest in their Performance Best Practices that serving static content from a cookieless domain or using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps. This reduces total size of the requests made for a page. In this article, I will explain you how to you implement this in 30 minutes flat.
Using a CDN for a small website or blog would be expensive. So is there a way we can set up our own CDN or a cookieless domain from which we can serve the static content? The answer is Yes! And I will describe the steps to achieve this.
What is Static Content?
Static content is the content such as images, Javascript and CSS files that are served along with your webpage. Server sets cookies for all the HTTP requests. So small cookies get attached to these static content as well. However, since there is no direct user interaction with these resource, they need not have cookies attached. We can reduce the request size by serving these resources from a CDN or a cookieless domain.
What is a CDN?
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers geographically distributed across the globe. The server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen to deliver the content, thus improving response time. CDN is generally used to serve static content and does not set any cookies. Thus the request size is also reduced.
How to setup our own CDN or a Cookieless Domain?
Easiest way is to setup a CNAME record aliasing your static domain to your main domain. You will need register a separate domain name to do this or you can use a subdomain of your domain.
If you do not have a separate domain, create a subdomain using your site’s control panel. Make sure that the subdomain points to your main domain’s root folder.
Now that you have a domain or subdomain to serve static content, go to the DNS Zone Editor of your website’s control panel and create a CNAME record as shown.
Add the domain/subdomain you created earlier to the Name/Label/Alias of CNAME record. It should point to your main domain i.e. www.riyaz.net in this case.
If you are using a subdomain, you need to do one more step to make sure that no cookies get set on this subdomain. Two common cookie setters are WordPress and Google Analytics. Rob Flaherty has explained in easy steps how to prevent these sites from setting cookies on your static subdomain. The section ‘Separate domain or subdomain?’ explains how to get read of the cookies.
Now that you have setup a CDN or cookieless domain/subdomain, how do you actually serve your static content from this new location? Do you have to move the static files to this location? Not at all. You only need to modify the references to your static files (images/media/Javascript/CSS/text files etc.) to point to the new location.
e.g. http://www.riyaz.net/images/myimage.jpg will now become http://cdn.riyaz.net/images/myimage.jpg or http://www.mycdn.com/images/myimage.jpg
But this could be a cumbersome task. How do I do this quickly? Simply use the W3 Total Cache plugin from W3-EDGE and enable CDN. Use Mirror as CDN Type.
Now go to CDN Settings of the plugin and set the Configuration parameters as shown below:
You may leave the other parameters to their defaults.
Thus you have setup your cookieless static content provider.
More reading:
- Serving Static Content from a Cookieless Domain (Rob Flaherty)
- Use a Content Delivery Network (Yahoo! Best Practices)
- Serve static content from a cookieless domain or CDN (Google Best Practices)
15 Comments
Still confusing, how to make sure there is no cookies in my subdomain?
arithok recently posted..WordPress 3.0 Dirilis
Google Analytics and WordPress are most common cookie setters. Rob has explained in detail how to get read of these cookies in his article – http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/static-cookieless-domain/. See the section on Separate domain or subdomain?.
Just what I’ve been looking for – an easy to understand tutorial for cookiless domains.
I’m not sure if it’s worked for my site though as I ‘think’ my new subdomain is still serving the cookies. Followed the extra part you advised on Rob Flaherty’s site regarding wordpress & google cookies.
Help a newbie – how can I be sure the subdomain doesn’t serve cookies?
Try installing Firebug and Pagespeed addons on your Firefox browser and check what cookies are being set. If those are from WordPress or Google Analytics, then Rob’s method should help.
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Thanks Riyaz,
According to Firebug it’s one of my images so I’ve got the feeling I must have done something wrong when going through your tutorial, but what that might be I simply don’t know?
The only part I got slightly confused over was setting up the subdomain/CNAME as my host has different names for boxes that are shown in your example. Saying that, I think I managed to set them up successfully.
Niko recently posted..Homemade Healthy Dog Biscuits
Are you able to access the images using the new subdomain url? If you are able to do so, then you have set up the subdomain correctly. Then you can use W3 Total cache to easily replace the old urls with new ones.
Then you can proceed to get rid of the cookies as Rob explained.
I can now but not initially after finishing the tutorial. At first I was getting white boxes where all my pictures should be so I physically copied all my images to the new subdomain.
Is that something I did wrong?
You dont need to physically copy the files anywhere. Actually when you set up your subdomain, you create only a CNAME and not the A record. Check if any A record is created. If so, change it to a CNAME entry.
The new subdomain should point to the original domain’s root folder. Now the images or any objects should be accessible via the new URL.
Then simply put the subdomain name in W3 Total Cache CDN settings and it should work.
Ahhh….
So I did it wrong then, that’s why it hasn’t worked the way you’ve suggested.
Thanks so much for your points, I’m going to go back and try again. Will update again here when finished in case anyone else gets the same issues I had!
Hmm
I made some progress
But still not right
Made a totally new subdomain, and updated W3TC with it and it worked first time in that I didn’t need to physically transfer any files across, so progress yeah!
But still firebug reports cookies being set on this new domain. Nearly there – but not quite!
Cookie is listed as
utma=87976967.1178402482.1279961553.1280232849.1280234375.8; __utmz=87976967.1279961553.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)
Does that look like a cookie should look like? Certainly welcome any suggestions – you’ve been great so far!
Niko recently posted..Homemade Healthy Dog Biscuits
Great!
This looks like Google Analytics cookies. Check Rob’s article on how to tweak Google Analytics code to not set cookies on the entire domain.
Well I think I need to give up on this one, taking too many of my hours up lol.
Can’t get it to work but I think it’s W3TC and it’s configuration rather than the tutorial that’s causing it.
Thanks for all your input though
In W3TC, on the General Settings page: just select the check box to enable CDN and choose Mirror as CDN Type and save changes. Then on the CDN Settings page under ‘Replace site’s hostname with’ specify your subdomain url. Save changes and you are done.
Yeah I did all that but back to square one again, just getting white boxes where my images should be.
Error log says something about too many redirects, maximise the number of redirects allowed but I couldn’t find anything on google about it.
I’ve already taken up so much of this thread – and it’s only a comments page!
Niko recently posted..Homemade Healthy Dog Biscuits
Very interesting..
nice tips.. i’m still looking any tips to make my blog fast loading..
maybe i should try this tips..
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