Cloud & Infrastructure · Level 2
Making it fast
Mission briefing
Mission 3-B: The new marketing page takes eight seconds to load. Eight. Someone in analytics noticed the bounce rate, and now there's a thread. Your beautiful hero image is, it turns out, part of the problem.
Part of the slowness is latency — the travel time for data to get from our server to a visitor. A user in Tokyo hitting a server in Virginia waits for every byte to cross the planet. Distance is time.
The fix is a CDN — a network of copies of your files spread across the world. Instead of everyone fetching that hero image from one server, they grab it from the nearest copy. Tokyo gets Tokyo's copy. That alone could cut seconds.
The CDN also caches — it keeps a ready-made copy so it doesn't rebuild the same thing for every visitor. And on our side, a load balancer spreads incoming traffic across several servers so no single one drowns when the page goes viral.
So the page isn't 'badly designed' — it's being served the slow way. The hero image is fine once it's cached close to the user. Now I know the question to ask: is this on a CDN?
The marketing page loads slowly for overseas users. What's the most likely lever?