Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Optimizely Web Experimentation

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  • Optimizely Web Experimentation

Optimizely Web Experimentation uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN), a network of web servers located around the world, to provide service for rendering the snippet. This page is intended to act as a hub for our Knowledge Base articles on CDNs and related topics, like self-hosting the snippet.

Self-hosting the Optimizely Web Experimentation snippet

The easiest way to get Optimizely Web Experimentation working out of the box is by placing our code snippet in the head tag of your websites, which synchronously loads the Optimizely Web Experimentation software and the tests you are running. For information on how to set up Optimizely Web Experimentation in this way, refer to Get started with Optimizely Web Experimentation.

Benefits of self-hosting

Self-hosting the Optimizely Web Experimentation snippet can deliver several potential security and performance benefits. If you are using a CDN and HTTP/2 to serve your website, you will be able to use multiplexing to request the snippet faster.

An additional DNS lookup, a new HTTP connection, and an SSL handshake with the Optimizely Web Experimentation server are normally required during the initial load of the page.

If you have your own internal security policies that make loading a third-party Javascript tag difficult, a traditional self-hosting approach may work out better for you.

Self-hosting with CDNs

If you are using a CDN to serve your websites, you may be able to use your CDN configuration to also deliver the Optimizely Web Experimentation snippet to your site.

There are slightly different configurations based on if you are using a standard or custom snippet, so check your project first before you get started.