Survey of JavaScript content delivery networks

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 7 May 2012 in News, Content Delivery

Content delivery networks (CDN) are systems of distributed servers on the Internet, enabling content to be delivered with high performance and providing high availability.

CDNs are used in many ways nowadays, but one specific use is the delivery of standard components such as JavaScript libraries. A number of providers allow webmasters to serve libraries from their CDN instead of their own server. In addition to shifting the load of serving a site partly to a high performance CDN, the main idea is, that often a visitor may already have the JavaScript library in his browser cache, so that it doesn't need to be loaded again. That makes a site faster in those cases.

There are arguments for and against using a CDN for JavaScript libraries, but if you decide to use one, it is interesting to know which ones are used by other webmasters. This is what our new survey shows.

12.2% of all websites use the Google Libraries API. If you are not afraid to use yet another Google service, this might be a good start when searching for a CDN provider.

Google serves most of the common JavaScript libraries. Alternatives in our survey are from Microsoft, serving ASP.NET Ajax and jQuery, and dedicated CDNs for jQuery and for the Yahoo! User Interface Library. The last provider in our survey is CDNJS, which serves a large range of libraries.

Popularity is only one criteria when selecting a CDN, but for the specific purpose of service JavaScript libraries, it is an important one. We hope our surveys provide the required information here.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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