Backend and Infrastructure

Overview: Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Drupal for Drupal 8, 9, 10, and 11

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) play an important role in making a Drupal-powered site fast and secure. The distributed nature of CDNs allows serving web assets such as HTML files, JavaScript, CSS, and media assets through servers located in close geographical proximity to the users, thereby reducing the physical distance data has to travel between the user and the server, and improving performance.

In addition to providing a performance boost, CDNs may also act as a firewall and protect sites from common attacks such as DDoS. The popularity of CDNs has been growing over the past few years, and integrating with them has also gotten easier. Most Drupal web operation platforms, such as Acquia and Pantheon, offer integrations with CDNs out-of-the-box. Even if your hosting platform doesn't provide a CDN, you can always set up your Drupal site to use one.

In this tutorial we'll:

  • Define what a CDN is and what it can offer for your site
  • Learn about popular CDNs used with Drupal sites
  • Review some contributed modules that you can use to help integrate your Drupal site with a CDN

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to define what a CDN is, list CDNs with Drupal integrations, and describe the steps you will need to take to set up your site to work with a CDN.

Drupal Site Administration