James McNulty

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a great way to offload resources such as images, JavaScript and CSS from your server to another server that can deliver them more efficiently. For example, a CDN will host your resources across multiple servers in various locations so that when something is requested it can deliver it speedily from the server closest to the origin request. In addition to caching and compressing your resources, this gives your server much more bandwidth to load fewer resources, and as a result your page load speeds improve.

It’s quite commonplace for a CDN to use their domain in the URL for your resources, since they are the ones hosting them after all. Since custom CDN URLs matching your server are usually an added cost from CDN providers, most people settle for the server CDN URL, which usually looks something like this: 

Since your images are being hosted on a different domain, they won’t show up in Google Search Console when you set up your site because you don’t have ownership of example-cdn.com. A step is required in order to authenticate your ability to access data.

Fortunately there is a way to have the best of both worlds! 

Google Analytics has recently released a closed beta of a new Phone Analytics feature. We were fortunate enough to be able to test this out for an UpBuild client. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

When it comes to tracking form events in Google Analytics, some third-party form platforms integrate seamlessly, while others can be a little more challenging.

My experience with Formstack has been eye-opening and seems to fall somewhere between seamless and challenging.