A content delivery network can serve eligible website content from distributed locations and reduce repeated requests to the origin server. Its benefit depends on the content, visitors and configuration. A CDN subscription is separate from hosting unless the ordered plan explicitly includes it.
IN THIS ARTICLE
01 Plan the integration
- Identify the site's public hostnames and the origin service. Back up DNS records and document existing certificate and redirect settings.
- Follow the CDN's current onboarding instructions. Review imported DNS records and preserve email and other services that should not be proxied.
- Configure secure connections for both visitor-to-CDN and CDN-to-origin traffic using the supported validated TLS mode.
- Start with conservative caching suitable for the application. Static images, stylesheets and scripts are different from personalised account pages.
- Exclude login, account, cart, checkout and private API responses from shared caching as required by the application. Review cookie and session handling.
- Test the website from a signed-out session and a separate signed-in test account before expanding optimisation rules.
02 Verify a real customer journey
Check product changes, login state, form submission and checkout. A page loading quickly is not a success if one customer can see another customer's session or the store displays stale prices. Use response headers and the CDN's diagnostic tools to confirm the intended cache behaviour.
Why might a website update not appear through the CDN?
Check the origin, application cache, CDN cache and browser cache in order. Purge only the affected URLs where practical, then request a fresh copy. Repeatedly clearing every cache can hide a rule problem and create unnecessary load.
03 Know the limits
A CDN does not fix an inefficient database query that must still run at the origin, and cached content does not guarantee the whole site remains available during an origin outage. Some security or optimisation features require separate configuration or a particular CDN plan.
Keep a recovery record for DNS and proxy changes. If a rule breaks access, disable or correct the specific rule and verify the affected customer workflow rather than changing every setting at once.