The more (concurrent) traffic a website receives, the more important it is for its contents to be hosted on a content delivery network (CDN). By having your site resources spread out across many servers across many regions around the world, it will take much less time (in terms of “hops”, or jumps from server to server a request needs to make) to fetch the site’s contents.
One of Google Cloud’s less-known features is its Cloud CDN which leverages Google’s global network of data centers, servers, and ISP integration to deliver content to the end user in a quick manner. Its efficiency is further increased when coupled or used with other services in Google and Google Cloud, such as Google Domains, Google DNS, and Google Compute Instances. Since 2018, this site is hosted using Google’s Click-to-Deploy WordPress deployment (tutorial) using Google Domains (tutorial) with SSL encryption (tutorial) and maintenance via SSH to instance VMs (such as updating PHP version in Google Cloud VM Instance). Thus it is natural to leverage Google Cloud CDN, with the added benefit that it won’t break with updates to WordPress since the CDN configuration happens server-side and not WordPress-side.
Follow along with me as we explore how to activate Google CDN for your Google Cloud-hosted service.
