From the NordicCDN blog
Performance, caching, security and the craft of running a fast website or webshop.
Cart abandonment and speed: the link nobody talks about
There is a whole industry of advice about cart abandonment — emails, popups, discount codes. Almost none of it mentions the cause that quietly makes every other cause worse.
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How to put a CDN in front of your custom domain, step by step
Putting a CDN in front of your own domain is a short checklist and about four places people trip up. Here is the whole thing in order, including how to undo it.
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TTFB: what a good time to first byte looks like, and how to get there
Time to First Byte is the wait before your server says anything at all, and it sets the ceiling for everything after it. What good looks like, and how to find which part of yours is slow.
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Flash sales and ticket drops: handling 10× traffic gracefully
A flash sale is a traffic spike with a stopwatch on it — and a second problem most scaling advice ignores entirely: there is only so much stock, and everyone wants it at the same instant.
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Proof-of-work challenges: stopping bots without annoying humans
Nobody enjoys clicking traffic lights to prove they are human. Proof-of-work challenges take a different approach: make the work invisible to you and expensive for whoever is sending a million requests.
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WebP vs AVIF: which image format should you actually use?
Images are usually the heaviest thing on your page, so the format matters. AVIF squeezes smaller, WebP is everywhere — but the decision most sites should be making is a different one entirely.
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Surviving a traffic spike: how a waiting room keeps your site alive
Sometimes demand simply exceeds what your site can handle — a product drop, a viral moment, a ticket release. A waiting room is the difference between a queue and a crash.
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GeoDNS vs anycast: two ways to send users to the nearest server
Two technologies promise the same thing — send each visitor to a nearby server — but they decide at different moments, and one of them has quietly got less accurate over the last few years.
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Rate limiting explained: protect your API without blocking real users
Rate limiting stops one bad actor — or one buggy script — from hammering your site into the ground, without slamming the door on everyone else. Choosing the limits is the hard part.
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