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I understand the advantages of loading big and common libraries like jQuery from CDN.

But what about the smaller plugins and library helpers like jQuery-ui or bootstrap and its helpers. My site has about 10-12 of those.

Should I pick each of them individually from cdnjs and get the CDN benefits, but potentially have many more HttpRequests. Or should I locally compress and minimize them into one big plugins file and load from my server?

I see this question on SO framed as "Multiple libraries off a public CDN or one concatenated file on our CDN", but what if we don't subscribe to a CDN?

zaphod
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    Try them both and see which one is faster. – Evan Davis Apr 30 '15 at 21:31
  • Certainly. But since I am talking about fairly common plugins and libraries, I think this is a common problem would have an answer already since it is not my site-specific. – zaphod Apr 30 '15 at 21:46

2 Answers2

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The good thing about using CDN is that the user gets the file from the closest CDN. Also, it's probable that the user already has that file on his computer so he doesn't need to download it.

Creating bundles will minimize the amount of GETs the browser needs in order to get all the scripts/styles.

My recommendation is to use a combination of both because browsers can only download 5 files at the time. So, use CDNs for the most common libraries (the user probably already have them) and use bundles for your own files (your stylesheets or your JS files).

Check the network tab in Developer Tools measure the time it takes in each case.

Francisco Goldenstein
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    Yes, I am bundling and minimizing my files. My question was only for the third party libraries. Thank you for the recommendation. – zaphod Apr 30 '15 at 21:56
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I'll definitely advice to use what you can from cdnjs and similar CDNs. Most of the time people will have the files cached so there will be no additional HTTP requests.
Concatenating and magnifying everything that you can not load form CDN will save you some bandwidth and speed the loading time of your site.

Chavdar Slavov
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