Integrating a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to your WordPress site will noticeably improve your WordPress site visitors’ browsing experience. Learn how to setup a low-cost, high performance AWS Cloudfront CDN with this step-by-step tutorial that covers installation and configuration of both the AWS infrastructure services as well as the necessary WordPress plugins.
Summary
In this article we’ll implement the CDN and image optimization strategy that I use for this blog. When I’m working on this blog, the images that I upload to WordPress are automatically web-optimized and then replicated to Amazon’s Cloudfront CDN. Additionally, all of the image URL’s are automatically modified for me so that when you access the page, the HTML comes from this WordPress site but the images are delivered by Cloudfront CDN.
First we’ll setup a new Cloudfront CDN in our AWS account that is integrated to a free AWS S3 storage bucket. Afterwards we’ll install a WordPress plugin authored by Delicious Brains that integrates the CDN to our WordPress site. We’ll also install a second plugin from imagify.io that will automatically re-size and web-optimize our images based on how they’re presented on the page. These two plugins combined ensure that we’ve done everything reasonably possible to minimize the time that it takes site visitors to download digital assets from our site.