Self-Host Your Static Assets

11 July 2019 • Development • Web

Harry Roberts, writing at CSS Wizardry:

One of the quickest wins—and one of the first things I recommend my clients do—to make websites faster can at first seem counter-intuitive: you should self-host all of your static assets, forgoing others’ CDNs/infrastructure. In this short and hopefully very straightforward post, I want to outline the disadvantages of hosting your static assets ‘off-site’, and the overwhelming benefits of hosting them on your own origin.

I’m a little late to this (the post was written back in May), but it’s an interesting counter argument to the common practice of serving third party resources from a provider’s CDN. The post goes into a lot more detail, but if you can, host it yourself.