Category: Guide

In a previous article, we looked at how you could use CloudFront to do WordPress page caching. Using a content delivery network (CDN) is a great way to make your WordPress site fast for anyone on the planet.

That said, if you’ve ever had to deal with getting a good page speed insight score for a client, you know page caching is just one of part of the equation! There are other things necessary to optimize the performance of a WordPress site. One of them is image optimization.

Page speed insight expects you to have optimized images. As an example, this can mean converting gifs to pngs if they’re not animated. But, in most cases, it means converting images to the webp image format.

There’s currently talk of adding webp conversion to WordPress. But until that day, most of us install plugins that optimize images for us. That said, a lot of these plugins rely on (or try to upsell you) an image CDN to perform image optimization.

An image CDN is generally a better way to optimize images. They can do it seamlessly and require little to no integration with WordPress. For example, Bunny CDN has an optimizer product that’ll do image optimization on the fly for you. No plugin needed.

Now, CloudFront doesn’t have an image optimizer product like Bunny CDN does. Ymir can configure one for you. But if you’re not using Ymir, you’re not without options either. It’s actually quite simple to create a simple image optimization CDN with CloudFront using a Lambda@Edge function.

Previously, we looked at WordPress page caching using a content delivery network (CDN). This is an essential tool for speeding up a WordPress site at a global scale. That said, it’s still not commonly used by a lot of WordPress hosts.

With Ymir, you get a CloudFront (Amazon’s CDN) distribution set up to do page caching on production environments by default. This is a great feature of the product. But what if you want to configure CloudFront to do page caching yourself?

Well, this isn’t talked a lot about. In my research, the only article I found was this one on an AWS blog. This article will use that article as a baseline, but will discuss in more detail how to set up CloudFront.