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Optimizing Website Peformance with a CDN (jQuery)

If you want to increase load times for your site a good way is to serve your resources (js/images/css) from different hosts. Even better is to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) that has edge locations, see Amazon’s CloudFront,  that will serve those resources from hosts that are nearest to your viewers.  If it is logistcally possibly for your needs and its free is there any reason not to? Yes.

Specifically if you use jQuery on any of your sites more than likely you serve it with every page on your site, so if you want to have one less request for every page just use a free CDN to host it:  Google / Microsoft

A recent blog post @ elijahmanor.com explains more why you would want to do such a thing. However, a commenter on that blog post has a good point… If I point my jquery resource at one of these cdn’s how do I know that the files are being served since it is all client side? What’s worse is how much functionality is broken if jquery is 404′d from that CDN?

Well here’s a little trick that you can use verify that jQuery is loaded and how to handle it if not:

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Tags: cdn, jquery