Use a CDN to improve your website's performance

"80-90% of the end-user response time is spent downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Rather than starting with the difficult task of redesigning your application architecture, it's better to first disperse your static content. This will achieves a bigger reduction in response times." - Steve Saunders

Performance, Scalability and Cost efficiency to end users are main key factors for any web application. CDN (content delivery network) is the solution to achieve it. A CDN can offer 100% availability, even with large power, network or hardware outages. Traditional CDNs focus on web acceleration. New CDNs have integrated media delivery services so they are optimized for live video streaming, high definition video and large asset delivery.

Why we need to use CDN?
The main point of the CDN is caching. So, it definitely helps in improving performance and scalability of a website.

When not to use a CDN?
- Whenever you’re working offline.
- When you can deliver faster than the CDN, and care about that. This might be the case when all users are close to the server.

Privacy and security concerns.
Using the CDN, you are trusting the CDN to faithfully serve contents and relying on no third-parties injecting funniness in between the CDN and your user’s browser. It's good to use a reliable CDN like "Google’s The AJAX Libraries API"

The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular, open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader's google.load() method, your application has high speed, globally available access to a growing list of the most popular, open source JavaScript libraries including: jQuery, jQuery UI, Prototype, script.aculo.us, MooTools, Dojo, SWFObject and YUI

Try it in your web application to see performance improvement in your application.