Hello and welcome to WPBeginner. In this video, we'll cover how to
setup MaxCDN in WordPress to speed up your site.
As your website grows, you know having a slow site means losing visitors which really hinders
your site's success. Today we'll show you how to keep that from happening.
The first thing you want to do is go to Pingdom to get a baseline performance for your site.
As you see these are our results. Pingdom covers a lot of other items like web
caching and such, but for this video, we are concentrating on installing a CDN or Content
Delivery Network to speed up the delivery of static content for our site.
What a CDN does is it serves our static information from multiple servers
and that improves the site's performance.
The content network we use and I'll cover in this is MaxCDN and I'll go over how to set it up here.
You want to go to maxcdn's site and setup an account with them. Depending on your website
size will determine which price plan to go with.
After you setup your account, log into MaxCDN, go to Zones and click create pull zone.
From here you'll want to fill in the Pull Zone Name. This helps you know what site it is.
Fill in the origin Server URL:and make sure you the http:// and the trailing slash at the end of the url.
A label is the description for the zone
And when you are happy with the info, just click create button.
You'll get a Zone Successfully Created screen and you can close that now.
Now a pull zone will be created and you'll see a URL like this.
Let's copy this and save it in a notepad because I'll need that later.
So we just setup a Pull Zone and now we need to create custom domains.
Custom domains are subdomains on our site that will be queued into the user's browser in the backend.
To create custom domains, I'll go to my settings tab in my pull zone.
From here, we can setup several subdomains.
I'll add a few now.
cdn20.wpbeginner.com cdn21.wpbeginner.com
cdn22.wpbeginner.com cdn23.wpbeginner.com
Once I'm finished with this, I want to go to the cpanel of my website and update the
CNAME records for the subdomains.
I'm looking for the Simple DNS Zone Editor. Many hosting companies like BLuehost and Hostgator
show this in their Cpanel.
We want to create a CNAME so I'll fill in the subdomain and then, I'll
grab the URL that I saved in notepad earlier and put it here.
Now I'll click add CNAME record.
I'm going to do this for all my subdomains I created in MaxCDN settings.
Now that I've finished that, I need to go into the admin section of my WordPress site
and add the W3 Total Cache plugin.
Once I activate the plugin, I'll go to Performance-->General Settings and click on the CDN tab. This will
take me to the area where I enable CDN and Choose MaxCDN as the CDN type.
Once I update that, you'll notice a notification up at the top stating that a configuration
issue prevents cdn from working.
I can click specify here to go to the section where I need to enter my maxcdn credentials
and click authorize.
If I do it like that, it will go out and get my authorization key from maxcdn and I can
just copy it.
See how it says to go back to W3 Total Cache, now I can go back to my site and paste the
key there.
I also need to add all my subdomains that I created earlier. I can do that one at a time.
Now, I can test MaxCDN to make sure it's working. And when I see that it is. I can click Save
All Settings.
This should be all you need to get MaxCDN working and speeding up your site.
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