The real cost of ignoring a CDN
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Nobody bills you for neglecting a CDN. The cost shows up somewhere else.
Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- Distance to the server is real latency
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
A CDN also absorbs traffic spikes. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
A reasonable first step
Static sites benefit almost for free. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
How to tell if yours is fine
Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. Three things worth confirming about a CDN before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Distance to the server is real latency — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.