last reviewed by Netlify Support in Sep 2022
This article will describe our most frequent performance troubleshooting caveats and advice, for speeding up your Netlify site.
Our CDN may behave a bit differently than you or your typical benchmarking tools expect. When you say your site is slow, this is what we check on:
- Is DNS configured correctly, to leverage our CDN? Are you proxying to us?
- Are you using any custom caching settings? We review them and also how well your site makes use of our caching model by not changing unnecessarily many files with each deploy.
- Check your auth. Make sure you’re not using password protection. Password protection and HTTP basic auth do not make good use of our CDN (authentication is done at the origin, not the edge). Our Identity service using JWT’s does authenticate with good performance at the edge.
- You’re only as fast as your backend. If you proxy to another service or call functions, keep in mind that we can’t accelerate those things nor control how fast they respond.
- Keep in mind that our CDN caches opportunistically and cache is per-node; busy sites (excluding dynamic/uncacheable content such as SSR for Next.js or Gatsby sites) are served from cache. Most locations have several nodes so you may need to reload several times to get your content cached in your nearest location when testing a new page or site.
- Our CDN does not effectively cache large files (several megabytes). Keep things small.
- Also keep in mind that automated performance or load testing is forbidden without specific written permission from our team by our terms of service - and we generally don’t grant that permission below the enterprise level, so if you see some sporadically slow behavior, setting up a 10,000 page load test might lead to more consistent results, but it could also lead to us turning off your service. So, please follow the guidance below instead
Still have trouble? Send us a HAR file (preferrered), or the x-nf-request-id for a slow request, and we’ll be happy to investigate.