Improved site performance

jomCDN instantly improves your overall site performance, thanks to:

• location-based server load
• automatic image optimization
• gzip compression and minification of CSS and JS files
• browser caching with Expires and Cache-Control headers

(see Grade A in YSlow or significant Google Page Speed improvements).

How jomCDN helps your visitors

Location-based server load

Thanks to jomCDN, your website content is loaded from your visitor’s nearest server location. Your website will load faster, no matter where they are in the world.

Powerful page caching

When visitors view your web page, their browser will cache your assets (css, images, etc). They will experience nearly instant load time for the next page, as well as the next visit.

Automatic image optimization!

jomCDN includes integration of Yahoo's Smush.it service. Your images get optimized to the smallest size without losing any quality! No visible difference for your website visitor, but a big improvement in the page load speed!

Best of all: you don't have to do a thing, it is all automated!

How jomCDN helps you

Better server performance

By using jomCDN you save money on bandwidth, and can sustain high traffic periods much better. Your CSS and javascript files are automatically compressed and minified - reducing your bandwidth with up to 80%!

Add to this the automatic optimization of your images, and you'll save even more!

Higher conversion rates

Research shows that a slow loading website will lose visitors.

If visitors equal sales for your website, you can't afford to lose a single one! When pages load faster, visitors stay longer and are more likely to convert to customers.

In a study, Akamai revealed that the new threshold for ecommerce sites is 2 seconds. That means if a visitor does not see your page within 2 seconds, they're likely to leave! Don't risk it - get jomCDN now!

Faster page speed improves your SEO

Page speed is one of the most important factors in SEO today! With jomCDN you quickly improve your chances of ranking higher in Google's search results.

Technical details

• Objects have Etags.
• CSS and JavaScript files are minified and gzipped.
• Expires and Cache-Control headers are set for all objects.
• Supported file types: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, css, js, ico, htc, pdf, doc, docx, log, rtf, txt, wks, xls, xlsx, csv, dat, key, pps, ppt, pptx, xml, aif, aac, iff, mid, m3u, midi, mpa, mp3, ra, wav, wma, 3g2, 3gp, asf, asx, avi, flv, mov, mp4, mpg, rm, swf, wmv, 7z, deb, gz, pkg, rar, sit, sitx, zip, zipx
• If you need support for other custom file types, they can be added (with the exception of dynamic content)
• CloudFront service is not required, you can use S3 on its own.
• S3/CloudFront and Cloud Files are cookie free domains, therefore minimizing the request size.

jomCDN for Joomla will automatically…

• Compile and gzip all your images, javascript files, css files, etc and synch them to Amazon’s servers
• Re-link all your page content to the Amazon servers
• Reduce the load of your server bandwidth, because you’re using Amazon or Rackspace cloud hosting

jomCDN supports the following CDN services

• Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
• Amazon CloudFront
• Rackspace Cloud Files

Please note:

Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, and Rackspace Cloud Files have a minimal monthly charge. This charge is not included with the price of our subscription and will need to be paid directly to Amazon. The cost is minimal. Although it varies, we at 'corePHP' have not paid more than $2 USD per month for both services combined.

See Amazon S3 and CloudFront for pricing information. You can learn more about Cloud Files here.

What others say

We know that jomCDN will help you improve the speed of your Joomla site, but don't just take our word for it - read some of our customers’ testimonial on the Joomla! Extension Directory:

 

“My website's Google Pagespeed rating went from 67 to 86, which is remarkable.” A solid product with excellent support

   

 

”I’ve used JomCDN on a few sites now (configured with Amazon S3 and Cloudfront.) Installation sounds complicated at first, but if you follow the instructions step-by-step you'll be fine. I had a small problem on one site, and the support was excellent; corePHP adjusted a setting and then everything worked perfectly.

Most importantly, it does what it says - it has dramatically improved the load time of each site I've installed it on!” A must-have for any Joomla site

 

 

“It really helped my site to load twice as fast as before and I even moved up on my google ranking. This was a great purchase. Thanks.” Great product

 

 

“I took a chance on JomCDN and it immediately cut my homepage load time from around 4.5 seconds to around 2.5 seconds. Two seconds makes a tremendous difference in terms of whether a person will stay on your site or move on to the next Google hit!

With additional tweaking, I've gotten the site down to the one second range, almost as fast as Google or Yahoo's home page! Who says Joomla can't be used for professional-quality sites!!!” JomCDN is a must-have in my opinion

 

System requirements

• PHP 5.2 or higher
• MySQL 5.0.3 or higher
• cURL must be enabled
• cron access
• An Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files account
• Joomla! system file cache must be enabled on sites using Joomla 2.5
• open_basedir and safe_mode must be disabled. Both prevent necessary API access to place assets on the CDN

Installation steps for jomCDN

Installing jomCDN for your Joomla! website is an easy step-by-step process. Here is a short summary of the installation steps:

1. Download jomCDN
2. Run a speed test on your website (just for fun, and to see the improvement later)
3. Sign up for Amazon S3 (or Rackspace) and create a “bucket”. This is where you’ll store your files.
4. Sign up for Amazon CloudFront and setup the information.
5. Install and configure jomCDN
6. Run a speed test on your website (to see the improvement)

For a detailed guide showing you how to install jomCDN (including a video tutorial), see the tab “Guide”.

Video Tutorial

Step by Step

This tutorial will show you how to host your website site on a CDN (content delivery network).

A CDN solves the problem of hosting your website in only one part of the world:

• If your server is in the U.S.A., it's going to load much more slowly for visitors from Australia
• If your server is in Germany, your visitors from India are going to be waiting a long time.

CDNs solve that problem by hosting your content on multiple servers around the world. The client accesses the copy of the data that is nearest to them instead of pulling it directly from your central server. This speeds up load time and eliminates bottlenecks!

jomCDN is a Joomla extension that automatically collects your site's assets (images, Javascript files, CSS files, etc.), synchronizes them with Amazon's servers and relinks all your page content to the Amazon servers. Once it's set up, each person gets your sites file from the Amazon server nearest to them. Wherever your site visitors are in the world, they'll be happy.

Here's how to use jomCDN:

 

Download jomCDN

jomCDN is made by CorePHP.com and costs $29. Click here to view the product's page on extensions.joomla.org.

Install a Speed Test

In order to see whether jomCDN speeds up your site, we're going to need an independent test. A good choice is Page Speed from Google. It works with the Firefox browser and the Firebug extension.

• Click here to download Firefox (if you don't currently have it)
• Click here to install Firebug
• Click here to install Page Speed

When you have Firebug installed, visit the page you want to analyse and click on the small bug icon in the corner of your Firefox screen. That will enable Firebug.

I'm going to analyze http://www.alledia.com where I sometimes write blog posts. I clicked on the Page Speed tab and then clicked on "Analyze Performance".

It produced a score of 82 out of 100 for this site. It also points out some areas in which I could improve the speed of this site.

Let's set up jomCDN and see what the score is afterwards.

Signing up for Amazon S3

Lots of the Joomla files that we have on our site are going to be transferred to Amazon's servers, so we need to set up an account there. Go to http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ and sign up. The hosting is very, very cheap and will likely only cost you a few cents per month.

Once you've signed up, you'll need to do two things.

1. Go to Account >> Security Credentials and get both a "Access Key ID" and a "Secret Access Key" (screenshot above)
2. Go to AWS Management Console and click "Create Bucket". Enter a name that you'll remember (screenshots below)

Hopefully now you're finished you'll have three details written down:

• "Access Key ID"
• "Secret Access Key"
• The bucket name

Set up Amazon CloudFront

We now need to sign up for a second Amazon service.

• Amazon S3 is where our files will be stored.
• Amazon CloudFront is the actual CDN system which we send our files to a server in Australia for our Australian visitors, to a server in Germany for our German visitors and so on.

Go here to sign-up: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/. You will need to use the same account details as you used for Amazon S3.

Once you're logged in to Amazon Cloudfront, click "Create Distribution". The only thing you need to do is choose the bucket name that you created earlier:

When you've saved that, you'll get a row of information about the setup. The one column you need to copy is the "Domain name".

Now that you have that, place it with the information you had earlier. You should have these four pieces of data:

• "Access Key ID"
• "Secret Access Key"
• The bucket name
• The domain name

Install and Configure jomCDN

• Go to your Joomla site and install the jomCDN plugin.
• Go to Extensions >> Plugin Manager and open it up. Here you'll need to enter those four pieces of information we collected earlier.
• Enable the plugin and click Apply

There's one final task to do now. We need to set up a cron job. That will allow us to regularly update the file on Amazon's servers.

Inside the plugin, scroll down to the "Complete setup" field. There will be a URL for the cron job with the format htttp://yourdomain.com/?cdn_run_cron

Click that link and you should see a list of all the Joomla files being added to Amazon's servers:

If you don't see this message, its likely that another plugin is blocking it from working. To fix the problem, go to Extensions >> Plugin Manager and disable the plugins one-by-one until the cron job works. The most likely culprits are other compression / speed plugins that you'll find in the Plugin Manager under the "System" category.

Note: once the cron job link is working successfully, go to the "Advanced Parameters" tab inside the Extensions >> Plugin Manager >> jomCDN and change the "Cron Job URL Parameter" part of the URL to something else. As Alejandro notes in the commnets below, it's not safe for other people to know this URL.

Now you have a secret, successful URL, you're ready to set up the cron job. Each host is likely to be different, but our host Rochen.com uses CPanel, a very popular hosting control panel.

Login to the hosting account and click on "Cron Jobs":

Choose a frequency for your cron job (once a day is a good choice, enter the URL of your cron job into the "Command' link and click "Add New Cron Job"

Test Your Setup

Now that my setup is complete, I'm going to use Page Speed once more to test the site's speed. This time it gives a result of 89/100 with far less important errors.

I've still work to do on speeding up the site, but jomCDN has helped by nearly 10 points out of 100.

Let your visitors access your Joomla website faster

Imagine the Internet as a bunch of computers all over the world. Each computer store the website data that you see when you browse the web.

If the website you visit is stored on a computer on the other side of the world, it will take longer to load on your computer.

CDN means “Content Delivery Network” (or content distribution network). It’s also a system of computers around the world, but they contain copies of the website data. Keep on reading, and you'll understand why this is useful for your Joomla website.

Why should you use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

Nobody likes a slow loading website! Your website visitors might even leave your site before it loads. When you use a CDN extension for your Joomla website it changes everything!

By using a content delivery network (CDN), your website visitors will access the copy of your website data that is nearest to them - instead of pulling it directly from your central server.

This means faster loading and happier website visitors - and no more visitors leaving your Joomla website because it’s slow!

Joomla website speed and SEO

One of the most important factors in technical SEO today is page speed. When you use a Joomla CDN extension:

• your Joomla website will load faster
• you will follow Google’s guidelines for performance optimization
• you improve your chances of ranking higher in the search engine results

If you want to increase your chances of higher rankings and happier visitors (more likely to convert to customers) - get jomCDN now!