Content Delivery and Caching Strategies

Content Delivery and Caching Strategies

CDN integration provides crucial performance benefits for HTTPS delivery. Modern CDNs offer SSL termination at edge locations, minimizing the distance between users and TLS handshakes. This geographic distribution reduces latency more effectively than centralized HTTPS servers. CDNs also handle TLS session management, certificate updates, and protocol optimizations transparently.

Caching behavior with HTTPS requires different strategies than HTTP. While HTTPS prevents intermediate proxy caching, browser caching and CDN edge caching remain effective. Proper cache headers ensure resources are stored appropriately without compromising security. Private content uses no-cache directives while static assets leverage long cache times. Understanding HTTPS caching semantics enables effective performance optimization.

Resource optimization becomes more important with HTTPS due to connection establishment overhead. Minimizing the number of requests through concatenation, spriting, and inlining reduces handshake impact. However, HTTP/2 multiplexing changes optimization strategies, favoring granular resources over concatenation. Balancing these approaches requires understanding your protocol mix and user base.

Preconnect and DNS prefetch hints help browsers establish HTTPS connections proactively. Adding preconnect hints for critical third-party domains allows browsers to complete TLS handshakes before resources are needed. DNS prefetch provides lighter-weight optimization for less critical domains. These resource hints significantly improve perceived performance for HTTPS sites with multiple domain dependencies.