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The main site moves onto WPX's CDN, plus three wasted requests per page removed

HighWordPress sites 2 min readBy Christopher W
TL;DR: psychedelicsinrecovery.org now runs through WPX's content delivery network, the way the service site already did. Until today the main site was served straight from a single origin server. Real-visitor data showed pages taking about 8 seconds on mobile before anything appeared. Cached pages now arrive from WPX's edge in under a fifth of a second. Separately, three broken stylesheet requests that every page was making are gone.
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Why the main site felt slower than the service site

Google’s real-visitor data (the last 28 days) is only available for the main site, and it was the clearest signal yet: about 8 seconds on mobile and 7 seconds on desktop before the first content appeared. Looking at how the site was actually wired up explained a lot of it. The service site and the committee portals all sit behind WPX’s CDN, but the main domain still pointed straight at the origin server. Every visitor’s request travelled all the way to one machine.

The move, done carefully

  • Before switching anything, we tested the CDN directly. At first it answered with a “not configured yet” page, so we held off rather than risk an outage, and checked with WPX on the right order.
  • The switch itself happened in the domain’s DNS settings. We added the new addresses with a short cache time first, so an undo would have taken minutes rather than hours. Only then did we remove the old ones.
  • Email was left exactly as it was, since mail runs separately from the CDN.
  • Within minutes, the CDN was serving the real site with a valid certificate. Cached pages now load from WPX’s edge in about 0.18 seconds to first byte.
  • We double-checked that the store’s cart, checkout, and account pages are never cached, so no one can ever see someone else’s cart.

Three wasted requests per page, gone

One add-on plugin was asking every page to load three stylesheets from a folder that doesn’t exist. Each failed request didn’t just waste bandwidth; it made the server build a full “page not found” response from scratch on every single visit, competing for the same small pool of server workers real visitors need. A tiny code snippet now stops those requests. Nothing changed visually, because those files never loaded anything to begin with.

What we’ll measure next

Real-visitor numbers update over a rolling 28-day window, so we’ll check back on that 8-second figure in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the next round of improvements is lined up: lighter images on the service site, fewer font files, and the events calendar’s return.