Better Speed with Images in Subdomain : Reality or Theory

It’s not a theory I’ve even come across before!

This is not a theory, this is how the big dogs do business. Google, yahoo, Facebook,… The difference that it makes depends on the site. It makes a big impact when your site has a lot of assets (not only images) loading on the same page, and it helps distribute the load in to two- three or four channels rather than one. Web browsers (modern) normally use 4 connections to download information and if you are serving all your content from a single domain, things get hung-up until a free connection becomes available. This is not strictly WordPress, this is how the web works.

Normally, HTTP requests are issued sequentially, with the next request being issued only after the response to the current request has been completely received. Depending on network latencies and bandwidth limitations, this can result in a significant delay before the next request is seen by the server.

HTTP/1.1 allows multiple HTTP requests to be written out to a socket together without waiting for the corresponding responses. The requestor then waits for the responses to arrive in the order in which they were requested. Splitting request can make a dramatic improvement in page loading times, especially over high latency connections.

Some people who don’t have a clue about this practice might say that it increases DNS look-ups, but you are serving all the files from a single server with a same IP address, so that’s not the case.

So the main question is: Is it worth it? The answer is Yes and No. Yes if you are your own webmaster and know when to split and how to split, and NO for clients who publish regularly and don’t have a clue.

Thanks Shirazdrum and Esmi!

1. So, my main question is that how much difference does it make for any normal blog?

I am the webmaster and it’s my own blog. It’s a design related blog so it would have 5-10 images on each post and perhaps 3-4 posts per week. I am expecting about 800-1000 visitors per day.

2. If I keep the images in a subdomain is the backup and restore process is going to be exactly the same? 3. or there are few things that I should take care of if I am using subdomains?

4. And lastly, is there any possible downside of using subdomain for the images/media?

Saicode,

It’s hard to say how much difference until you try it. It all depends on how your site load as of now and if it’s optimized as much as it can be. Can you post a link to your site so I can see?

And lastly, is there any possible downside of using subdomain for the images/media?

Having a lot of images and lot of requests to the database is not necessarily a bad thing. Making bad requests and having un-optimized images are usually the problem. Take a site like Photobucket for example. The entire site is nothing but images, but it still performs well, because it’s setup to do that. In most cases, it’s not wise to move images to the sub-domain, since your images help with your search engine ranking results. What you can do is to put your external files on a sub-domain like Stylesheets, JavaScripts,… again it all depends on the current setup and the nature of the business.

Maybe all you need is a good CDN setup and you don’t even have to bother with this.

Thanks Shirazdrum.

It’s a new blog that I am going to start. Those numbers are based on my current non-wordpress site.

I didn’t realize that sub-domain might affect search engine ranking results! then how does CDN does not affect the SEO?

May be I am just overestimating… I might be just fine with the default configuration only. I would think about it when the traffic would actually need it.

Is it possible to move the images (automatically) to a new subdomain/CDN with after some time, when the blog is already up and running?