Let Northern Pride speed up your website by serving your static web content from a cookieless subdomain. The majority of your website load time is most likely taken up by serving images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc., delivering this media from a cookie free domain is a good practice to decrease request latency and improve load times. We recommend serving images and CSS files from a cookieless domain.
Here are 4 easy steps to deliver your static page content from a Cookie Free Domain:
- Create a Subdomain: Using cPanel create a new subdomain called static.yourdomain.com (Allow 24 hrs to propagate)
- Point Subdomain to Route Directory: Veriffy the new subdomain is pointing to your route directory such as /public_html and NOT a secondary directory like /public_html/static
- Edit DNS: Add a cName Record for primary domain as follows: Name static.yourdomain.com, and CName yourdomain.com. Allow 12 to 36 hours to propagate.
- Update HTML Image Path Code: Point all image urls to http://www.static.yourdomain.com/yourfilename.jpg
Google Analytics Users: Update your code to the latest version and modify the code. You will need to replace ‘auto’ to the 'www.yourdomain.com' in the Analytics code. If using Google Tag javascript change the default gtag to look like this:
gtag('config', 'UA-509356712-1', {'cookie_domain': 'www.yourdomain.com'}) . Lastly, within Google Analytics Admin, under Property > Property Settings make sure Property Name and Default URL have the www.yourdomain.com address. You should do the same for View > View Settings - Website URL
To verify that your website is passing the static content from a cookie free domain, use the developer tools built into Firefox or Google Chrome
Test your website speed using the Pingdom Speed Test Tool. Depending on your site configuration, you should be able to score over a 95 out of 100. After you have maximized your score in Pingdom then run a website performance analysis at GTMetrix. For additional performance tools check out Google Page Speed Insights.