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My developer has suggested to move all /content (~15gb) of our product PDF's, images, etc to be pulled from S3 storage instead of our main hosted wordpress site. Will this actually make a significant performance difference on our site? How it was explained to me, it will help our server's overall response time.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to migrate to a better host? We're currently hosted on wordpress.com (automattic hosting) and was thinking to migrate to cloudways.
The thought here is Amazon has global network distribution and so images, pdf’s and heavy files are served through amazon’s robust network (Data can also be placed strategically based on where most of your userbase is – or the closest location)
Typically a webpage will require hundreds of requests all from your web server – with WordPress it’s building the page as the user clicks it – if the web server can serve text, styles and WordPress itself, it should perform quicker because it’s not also downloading heavy assets or files from your web server, but a third-party platform designed for such purpose.
A faster host is always an option, but “content delivery networks” are a very common practice with enterprise or high volume websites.
The usual CDN will produce a very similar result with much less development time.
Cloudways is an excellent choice.
Yes, it will. No he is not wasting time. Having your media files on cloudflare means that your server will focus on serving the website afap and the cloudflares robust global network will handle the files and media. Will significantly improve your website speed.
Are you having problems with the site response time? If you’re hosted on wordpress.com, they do already have a built-in CDN and other stuff like that available for some of the higer-cost plans. (Their business and higher plans)
Moving to a different host can help, but distributing the costs to several vendors (S3, the new hosting provider, a CDN and your developer) will increase the friction and cost of maintaining your website. Make sure it’s going to make a difference first.
S3 is indeed a storage solution, it’s not meant to improve performance, it’s meant to store a lot of stuff efficiently/affordably.
Performance of serving static files is achieved by putting a content delivery network (CDN) in front of your storage.
WP com cloud infrastructure is already well regarded and competitive. Are there “better” hosts? Possibly. However if you are already on major WP-specialized hosting it would take quite a bit more than “move stuff to S3” to get a meaningful performance gain, at reasonable migration cost, at the same or lower price.
Host at Cloudways, serve huge files at S3 and you’re safe.
Amazon s3 isn’t particularly fast by any means, at least not the base version. I think the developer is wasting their time (and yours).
Yep. We use Cloudways and connect it to BunnyCDN.
the value of time spent (to your original question) comes back to how much are speed improvements worth to your business. i’ve worked clients in the airlines space with millions of site visits a day – and users drop off by page load time was charted out combined with customer value.. they would spent LOTS of time and money to improve those because it translated to $$$ for them.
yes. cdns are good for delivering content – will make your page faster, is it a waste of time? depends on your business and what people are doing on your site and what those performance gains mean to the bottom line.
* Amazon S3 is not performance-related, it’s just a storage solution
* A CDN is something else entirely, and if that is what he intends to use (on top of S3) then he should say so
* CDNs often price per usage, and the pricing is always higher than the cost of one private VPS, so make sure you understand what this means
* Cloudflare has a free tier of CDN which you can put on top of your existing website without having to move to S3
* If any account is opened, it should be in your name, don’t allow anyone to claim ownership over your files (and if you have to share your password, make sure to change it to a temporary password that you change later – also always maintain your own access to the server hoster etc. including 2FA)
> Wouldn’t it be more efficient to migrate to a better host?
Depends – Were the files even a problem?
If they were, he should be able to prove how he diagnosed it. If they weren’t… well then yeah they’re wasting time. Even if it helps slightly, focusing on things that aren’t a real problem is always a waste of time.
As another example: If your clients are exclusively from your own country, and your server is also hosted in your own country w/ fast speeds, then a CDN might not even help you. CDNs are only useful across large geographic locations (e.g. if you sell internationally).
Your Developer is making perfect sense. You can still keep your PDfs on a host but it will be much faster for users to put them on S3.
DO NOT USE CLOUDFLARE! Scammer company.
What problem are you trying to solve? If you’re self hosting WP then it would be a good idea to move the 15GB of PDFs off site to S3 but if you’re on WordPress.com it will be designed to scale and there won’t be an advantage in moving those offsite, except perhaps lowering hosting costs.
Your dev is right, and you should actually pay your developer more for this initiative