I’ve previously mentioned some of the workarounds of using the excellent W3 Total Cache plugin with a CDN and utilising HTTPS on some pages. The heart of the matter is that some CDN providers do not provide Custom HTTPS support out of the box or do but with a normally large monthly fee attached, some like the excellent MaxCDN will provide free shared SSL support but that is on there own domain, for example for this website, using MaxCDN my HTTPS domain for CDN is stswebsite-somersettechnica.netdna-ssl.com.
The Problem
By default when you configure W3 Total Cache with a CDN it assumes that your CDN hostname is the same for HTTP or HTTPS. However for providers like MaxCDN and people that don’t want to pay or simply merit the costs of Custom HTTPS support, this means, that as before without disabling CDN on HTTPS pages you would get a mixed content error or worse the CDN elements may fail to load at all, something especially true with Google Chrome.
The Solution
We stumbled upon a solution while chatting with the W3 EDGE team about the issue that there currently exists a way to specify the HTTPS CDN hostname separately from the HTTP hostname. It appears that this feature request was completed some time ago but never made its way into documentation, and the solution is remarkably simple and requires no code changes or additions to get working.
Yes it is that simple! in case the image is unclear, in the replace site’s hostname with field, simply supply a comma separated list of hostnames in the format [code]cdn.httpdomain.com, cdn.httpsdomain.com[/code] and W3 Total Cache will do the rest for you. If you take a look of our Contact page source then you will see that things like CSS files are now loaded from the different HTTPS endpoint compared to the other pages on the site.
If you are a MaxCDN or NetDNA customer you can find your HTTPS domain very easily, login to your MaxCDN/NetDNA portal, go and manage your Pull Zone, there should be a tab called SSL, simply make sure the enable shared SSL option is ticked and save your settings, then the SSL URL should be shown on that same tab if it wasn’t already like in this screenshot:
Now you can enjoy faster more consistent page load times even on HTTPS without causing an extra drain on your server or your wallet.
Thanks for sharing this solution. It is bad practice for MAXCDN not to share this information. I have had some long arguments with them as of late. I had a feeling there was a work-around.
Thanks again.
Nice post! I had a similar problem with maxcdn. But I found a cheap CDN that doesn’t got the issue: http://www.keycdn.com