How to make your CMS more efficient with Fastly

Content management systems (CMS) are an integral part of the modern Internet. But whether you’ve built your own CMS or are using one of the popular platforms, there are issues that everyone faces: too slow, difficulty updating content, difficulty preparing changes before publishing them, and long loading times for published content for users. Fortunately, Fastly can help solve almost all of these problems.

Most CMSs have similar requirements: authentication, editing, content storage, rendering, personalisation, image management, redirects, and caching. Whether you use a CMS in the cloud, manage your own WordPress, or develop and maintain a fully custom CMS for your business, many of the improvements you can implement will be the same and work best when implemented at the edge.

Solutions for your type of CMS

There are many terms that try to distinguish between CMS design approaches. But almost any CMS can benefit from being used at the edge. Most CMSs work in one of three ways in practice:Monolithic or “traditional” systems

Content is created, managed, and presented within a single system, and users typically access it through a web browser.

Even for such monolithic systems, edge caching can be a good solution. For example, purging the cache on the edge when content changes and varying it based on login state can increase cache hit rates and reduce the load on the CMS (especially if the CMS is old and resource-intensive), while only using the edge as a cache.

Separating other functions from the monolith is a good way to get huge security and performance benefits without the need for significant changes to your CMS architecture. For example, moving block lists, filtering rules, and query normalisation to the periphery. For more reputable sites, an unexpectedly high number of requests leads to redirects, so offshoring them also reduces the load on the source.

Static site generators (SSG)

This is mostly a reaction to the performance problems of monolithic CMS. Static site generators are designed to convert all stored content into a set of static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can be served on a web host such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. SSGs also typically use markup to create content and rely on git for version control. But you still need to implement a separate API to incorporate any customised elements into the final site.

SSGs create an essentially “static” website, and while you can augment them with APIs, it’s still difficult to achieve good SEO – access control in particular can be tricky. Peripherals are a great place to solve these problems by moving personalisation and partial rendering, as well as routing, filtering, listing blocking, normalisation and redirects.

You don’t have to do all the rendering on the edge – static site generators can create almost complete pages together with fragments or “parts”, with the “final assembly” taking place on the edge.Split/Hybrid (API-oriented)

These systems focus on providing high-quality APIs that can be consumed by other systems to separate the rendering and display of content from the rest of the CMS. This typically avoids the need to pre-build the entire site and makes it easier to support personalisation, native applications, physical print and other media display formats, and often provides a rich content editing experience.

In this architecture, the ability to interact with the CMS API layer allows you to perform rendering partially or completely on the periphery, as well as user authentication and authorization. This leaves the main CMS focused on information architecture, storage and queries, and editing.Pre-configure configuration or authorization

When you receive a page request, you may want to make a lot of decisions about testing, access privileges, identity, and other aspects. There are several ways to do this: for small amounts of data that rarely change, the fastest way to read it is simply to encode it into a peripheral configuration. However, a more common option for VCL services is to use peripheral dictionaries — an easy way to maintain a key-value store with hundreds or even thousands of elements that are proactively distributed across the periphery.

If you need to process large amounts of data that change frequently, or if each request requires a unique configuration, consider using a “pre-flight request”. This term refers to executing an API request before the main client request is sent to the backend.Clearing the cache when changing content

In most cases, there are only two optimal storage time (TTL) values for caching content on the periphery: zero or infinity (where “Infinity” often means “year”in practice). There may always be exceptions, but if you only manage data for a few minutes or an hour, why not increase that time and only clear it when it changes?

The Fastly cache is programmable and controlled, which means you have full control over what you store in the cache. You can highlight this data at any time!

Also, you don’t have to delete just one item. With a single API call, you can clear the entire cache of your site (“full cleanup”). With pre-planning, you can also clear content groups by tags, such as all the genders of a particular author or all pages that contain the title of a particular article. This allows you to delete not only the modified content, but also all links to it.Image optimization

CMS systems usually provide the ability to pre-render images of various sizes, but for maximum flexibility, you should consider performing these tasks on the periphery. This allows you to avoid processing each image separately, which speeds up the site creation process. Thanks to The Intelligent Fastly modification, you don’t need to determine the main point of the image yourself — the system will automatically detect it and perform high-quality image processing for any size.

Ready to make your CMS more efficient and faster? Implement Fastly today to ensure optimal performance, security, and flexibility for your content. Try out the free version of Fastly and find out how it can improve your site and provide a great experience for your users.