Making MODX Sites Scream with MaxCDN

After years of threatening to do so, we finally created a MaxCDN integration for MODX. Spoiler alert: things get fast, fast.

By Ryan Thrash  |  Updated: August 8, 2014  |  2 min read
Making MODX Sites Scream with MaxCDN

Want to increase conversion or to keep visitors on your website? If so, it's imperative to serve content quickly … probably quicker than you think. Most people understimate how impactful the difference between 8 seconds and 2 seconds can be when it comes to serving sites.

Get down into sub-second timing and the difference can be massive. A faster site should also rank better in search engines than a slower one, all things being equal.

To aid reaching the sub-second holy grail in MODX, MaxCDN was kind enough to fund the development of the MODX Team's newest MaxCDN Toolkit MODX Extra. Garry Nutting has worked on it over the last few weeks with impressive results: we've seen it play a significant roles in an almost 4x improvement in site rendering as an example.

MaxCDN Toolkit MODX Extra Graphs

MaxCDN is a Content Delivery Network, or “CDN”, previously mentioned in or recent article on speeding up MODX sites. The beauty of using the MaxCDN toolkit is that beyond installing and configuring the Extra, you don't have to change how you build you sites or where you upload your assets—MaxCDN will pull them from your site and the plug-in handles rewriting paths for you.

Setting it up the MaxCDN Toolkit MODX Extra is straightforward so starting is simple, it graphs the data it offloads so you can see what is happening, and it is highly configurable from the UI so you can adapt it to your exact needs without hacking the code. By default it hands over serving images, CSS, JS and XML files to MaxCDN, including ones dynamically generated by MODX if you set cache headers. If you care about conversion, it almost certainly will help.

If you already have a MaxCDN account, you can use it with the MaxCDN Toolkit; if you'd like to save 25% for life and want to see MaxCDN kick a little bit back to help fund MODX's ongoing development, sign up at http://modx.com/maxcdn and spend less time serving sites today.