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As we all know all to well once you’ve got your websites basic design and functionality set up the battle for to obtain the optimal user experience has just begun. What I find most of my clients completely disregard due to it’s difficulty to fix or they don’t know where to begin fixing their websites page load speeds.

Well, as you’ll find out through this guide the implementation of a CDN to any websites promises fast speeds regardless of the hosting plan (of course VPS and Dedicated hosting trump shared). Because this week and the next few upcoming have been a tad hectic I’ll be only going over how to set up Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3 and W3TC Total Cache (for CloudFront) and nothing else: sorry.

And so we begin.

Setting up CloudFront CDN w. WordPress & W3TC Total Cache

1. Please visit Amazon Web Services homepage and create and account. Once you’ve set up your account please log back in. You’ll notice on your homepage that you’re not subscribed to any AWS services. Please scroll down and click subscribe on Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3.
2. Access your WordPress admin dashboard and select add new plugin. Search for W3TC Total cache, install & activate.
3. Remember this is solely about W3TC’s CDN settings. Please select the general tab located under the performance heading.
4. Ensure that the enable CDN check box is selected and the drop-down menu has Amazon Simple Storage Service (push) selected. Save settings and continue to next step.
5. Head back to your AWS console. Under your name (account settings drop-down) please select account credentials.
6. Please copy and paste your Access key and Secret key to a blank notepad for the time being.
7. Head over to the CDN settings found under the Performance Tab. Under the configuration heading please place the information you’ve copied from the previous step. For the bucket please select any name you’d like for you bucket. EX JesseFogarty and click create bucket. Then click test. If successful continue to next step if not rinse and repeat the above.
8. Now that you’ve created your bucket you have the option to push directly from your S3 bucket or from a CloudFront distribution once you’ve got files uploaded. Please scroll up and click upload “custom files” “theme files” “include files” etc. Of course, my recommendation is a CloudFront distribution to take full advantage of CloundFront CDN. S3 is simply a storage keep that in mind!
9. Go back to the General settings of your W3TC plugin and change the drop-down selection from S3 (push) to CloudFront (push).
10. Head to your AWS console and head over to your CloudFront admin. From there you’ll want to create a distribution with the origin set to whatever you had named your bucket. Start typing your bucket name in and Amazon will find it.
11. Click next – don’t touch any setting leave ‘em be. In roughly 15 min your distribution will be set up and deployed.
12. Head to your CDN settings of your W3TC plugin and enter your AWS account info again – include your bucket and this time our CloudFront distribution domain.

Purge your cache and enjoy.

Having trouble? No worries please contact me to schedule yourself a free 1 hour consultation and we’ll get things sorted together! Suggestion or comments? Well you what to do, toss em below!

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