Overview

The Magento eCommerce platform serves more than 110,000 merchants worldwide and is supported by a global ecosystem of solution partners and third-party developers. Magento is a feature-rich, open-source, enterprise-class platform that offers merchants a high degree of flexibility and control over the user experience, catalog, content and functionality of their online store. Integration with Magento can be performed by simply making a small configuration change to your Magento Admin Panel.

Step 1: Create a website accelerator for your Magento powered website

Log into the MetaCDN portal and click on "Accelerate Site" on the top right hand corner. In this example we have a Magento powered website at the origin domain http://magento.metacdn.com/. We have given it the name "magento-demo". Hit Continue to advance to the next step.

Let's confirm the settings we made in the previous page. The accelerated website (once provisioned) will be available at the accelerated domain magento-demo.sa.metacdn.com. Click on Accelerate once you are happy the settings are correct.

You will see a confirmation screen with the details of your accelerated site. You should receive an email from MetaCDN once the accelerated domain is ready to use - this typically up to 60-90 minutes (but usually it's a lot faster).

Please wait until your accelerated site has completed provisioning before proceeding any further. You will get an email when it is complete, or alternatively you can navigate to Manage->Websites in the MetaCDN portal, and check the status there. If it says ACCELERATING it is ready to use.

Step 2: Configure your Magento powered website

Once your accelerated MetaCDN site is ready, log into your Magento Admin Panel as an administrator. Navigate to System -> Configuration -> Web and specify your accelerated domain from Step 1 as the Base Skin URL and Base Media URL in the Unsecure section.

In this example, the URLs for skin and media should be http://magento-demo.sa.metacdn.com/skin/ and  http://magento-demo.sa.metacdn.com/media/, as shown below. Optionally, you can update the Base Javascript URL, however this should be used with caution - and you should manually check your website to ensure all scripts are serving and working correctly if you choose to enable this.

Hit Save Config and you are ready to go! Your content such as css (style) files, product images and other media will now be served directly from our CDN, giving your Magento powered website a big speed boost.

Step 3 (Optional): Configure the secure section of your Magento powered website

Optionally, you can also accelerate your skin, media and javascript assets in the secure section of your website. Your users are typically on the secure section of your website when they are either logged into their account/profile on your website, or are checking out after adding items to their card. You can verify this is true for your Magento store by navigating to System -> Configuration -> Web, expand the Secure section. Your base URL should be using the HTTPS protocol, and 'Use Secure URLs in Frontend' should be set to Yes at a minimum. 'Use Secure URLs in Admin' may also be set to Yes, but that is not essential for this step.

Before making any further changes to the Secure section, please ensure SSL is enabled for your website accelerator by following the steps here:

SSL support for MetaCDN Site Accelerator

Once the change is complete (the state of your accelerator should move from PROCESSING back to ACCELERATING), you can set https (SSL) in the Secure section. Navigate to System -> Configuration -> Web and specify your secure accelerated domain from Step 1 as the Base Skin URL and Base Media URL in the Secure section. Make sure you use https as the protocol for each link.

In this example, the URLs for skin and media should be https://magento-demo.sa.metacdn.com/skin/ and  https://magento-demo.sa.metacdn.com/media/, as shown below. Optionally, you can update the Base Javascript URL, however this should be used with caution - and you should manually check your website to ensure all scripts are serving and working correctly if you choose to enable this.

Hit Save config and you are done! When users are checking out from your store and are on the secure site, they will still benefit from CDN acceleration of assets such as Skin, Media and Javascript. As these assets are delivered over https (SSL) you will avoid any nasty mixed mode warning messages as well, keeping your customers happy and confident in the security of your Magento store.