CDN and TTFB

[someoneelse]

Hello Fred

You are absolutely right. As long as the actual HTML page is built dynamically, a CDN won't help for your TTFB.

I am just now doing a major overhaul to speed up my fully dynamic site.

I rewrote the whole website so that the initial baseload (the "HTML file", javascript, CSS) is always the same, and that everything that's dynamic is loaded via AJAX calls. I even changed the URL scheme so it uses #, i.e. instead of example.com/some/path/to/page, the URL of the same page is now example.com#some/path/to/page.

Of course, that doesn't speed up the eventual, personalized content to the visitor, but the site appears way faster because the page is immediately there from the closest CDN server. Things that are filled in via AJAX have spinners and "loading" messages in them.

I don't know Joomla but maybe there have been people before you who have found a good solution and put it into a plugin.

Good Luck!