You’ve heard about us talking about how Content Delivery Networks (or CDNs) increase page loading speed, but did you know there are a handful of free ones out there that host some of the more popular libraries like Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and Font Awesome? Well, there are.
Why use a CDN?
CDNs are awesome for several reason and hosted CDNs are even better in some ways. For example, if your website uses jQuery (which it almost certainly does), instead of linking to your own copy of jQuery, use Google’s hosted libraries instead. That way, if any user has ever gone to another website that uses that same Google-hosted copy of jQuery, their browser skips downloading the file altogether and the page as a whole will load much faster.
Google Hosted Libraries
The Google Hosted Libraries is a content distribution network (CDN) for the most popular, open-source JavaScript libraries. Here’s why we’re HUGE fans of this CDN, but choices of hosted libraries are pretty slim.
Bootstrap CDN
Hosted by NetDNA (which is also MaxCDN), this site offers a dedicated CDNs for the popular Twitter Bootstrap responsive framework, Font Awesome and Bootswatch. Again, pretty slim pickings if you’re not a huge Bootstrap fan (like me).
Microsoft Ajax CDN
The Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network (CDN) hosts popular third party JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and enables you to easily add them to your Web applications. If you’re an ASP.net kind of guy, this is your CDN. If not, read on.
CDNjs
Again, all these only host the most popular libraries, but what about cookies.js, 960gs, or animate.css? Enter CDNjs. A really cool little open project supported by CloudFlare that supports this CDN hosting popular JavaScripts, CSS, SWF, images and more. Just search and embed. You can even upload suggestions for other libraries you think CDNjs should carry.
Onward!
I think you get it. Those are a few free CDNs that host some of the most popular libraries in the world.
Mind you, these are just libraries. To turbo charge your ENTIRE website, you’d need to host your own files on a CDN and use super-fast web hosting–like jHost ;).
