Why is your internet speed still so slow after using CDN? Here are 4 reasons!

CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is designed to speed up web page loading times, but have you ever found that despite using a CDN, your website is still slow? There are many other factors that can slow down your website or web application.

If you are evaluating or using a CDN, consider the following four areas, which are the top four factors that influence why your CDN is not effective:

Insufficient hardware resources

A CDN will offload traffic from your web server, but even with less web traffic, your server hardware may still not be able to keep up. If you’re still seeing spikes in CPU and RAM usage, it may be time to add or upgrade your hardware resources.

Software bugs or misconfigurations can also cause CPU spikes and memory leaks. Make sure you have the latest OS and software patches on your servers, and check that all server configurations are correct.

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Network Issues

While a CDN should provide a more reliable and efficient network, network problems with your server's ISP can cause bandwidth bottlenecks. Even if you have a CDN, if you encounter situations such as unexpected cuts in undersea communications cables, natural disasters, thieves who steal fiber optic cables, DDoS attacks, ISP routing problems, and hardware outages, it can also cause latency issues.

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Third-party objects

Nowadays, due to time-saving or cost-saving reasons, websites are increasingly occupied by third-party hosted objects, such as third-party javascript, analytical tools, and multimedia, and sites are becoming more and more bloated. CDN is designed to accelerate or cache content from the server, and will not cache objects hosted on third-party servers.

If a CDN will reduce the delivery of 4 objects from your site, but third-party objects account for 40% of total page load time, you might only see a 1.5x improvement, not a 4x improvement. The higher the percentage of total page load time that third-party objects account for, the less improvement the CDN will see.

Improper cache settings

The more objects you cache from your site, the more benefit you get from a CDN, so don't underestimate the power of caching. However, there are some objects that should not be cached, such as HTML files and scripts that need to be updated frequently.

You can set a shorter cache-control time for objects that need to be updated frequently, but having a short cache-control time for static objects that do not change often will not optimize your CDN utilization. If your website has low traffic, you may need a longer cache-control time. If the cache-control time limit of an object has expired, the next request will have to go back to the server instead of the CDN's edge.

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In summary, a CDN can overcome most of the issues that cause a website or web application to run slowly, but please also consider the above four potential reasons why your website may not be running at its full potential, so that you can more accurately determine the cause of slow network speed.