My WordPress site is powered by Thesis. Recently I installed the WP Total Cache plugin and a CDN. The load times were not bad but not great either - about 2 - 3 seconds for the homepage. I then switched to Quick Cache with no CDN, and my site seems more responsive (faster). You can check out my site here. Everything I've read indicates that a CDN should make things faster. My experience seems to suggest otherwise. I can understand the rationale for faster sites with a CDN, so maybe it's the WP Total Cache plugin... I've also tried some other CDN plugins, e.g. My CDN, CDN Rewrite, but the speeds don't seem to be too good either. Seems like a "simpler" cache plugin is the way to go. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm really interested to know if anyone has had a performance drop from using a CDN.
that typically should never happen. since CDN's help serve your your content faster. Please get in touch with the W3 Total Cache developers and explain your problem.
A CDN should improve your speed. What CDN service did you go with? Another suggestion is to take a look at https://www.cloudflare.com/ it is much easier to setup than a CDN and caches and speeds up a site. Just a thought.
Thanks for the comments. I'm using SpeedyMirror. I did consider the speed/reliability of this CDN as well but I'm willing to stay with it for a while longer (read below). I've also tried Amazon S3/CloudFront but the results were about the same. CloudFlare somehow messed up the look of the site, so it might have been a problem with how the CSS files are handled, especially layout.css (in Thesis). I think I've found the problem and a solution. Although I managed to get CDN working with WP Total Cache, it wasn't serving minified and compressed CSS and Javascripts (even when they were presumably correctly configured in the settings). This could be due to the fact that Thesis has 4 CSS files by default. I've heard of people making Total Cache work with Thesis... I've read a lot about this, but things just couldn't work for me. Problems in changing folder permissions on my current web host provider might be a contributing issue. So, while the CDN was serving static files, they were large (uncompressed) and there were "many" of them, i.e. 4 separate CSS files instead of 1. I don't have that many Javascripts, so the site isn't really affected by them. I was really frustrated by this conundrum... how could having a CDN slow down my site? Total Cache is a good plugin and has a lot of features but it wasn't doing what I wanted it to do. After searching for other plugins that could enable my site to work with a CDN, I found Autoptimize, which has a CDN feature and also minifies and compresses CSS and JS. Now I have 2 CSS files and 1 Javascript. And the site is definitely faster... I can see that the CDN is serving up the compressed files as well. I've also got Quick Cache and DB Cache Reloaded Fix For WordPress 3.1 installed in lieu of Total Cache. The site is a whole lot faster - about 1.5 seconds to load the home page (range: 0.9 - 2 seconds; first visit) vs 2.5 seconds (range: 1.5 - 3 seconds; first visit) with Total Cache + every feature including CDN turned on.