The website is also slow if the browser requests a resource from an origin that is very far away. Nothing is free. The typical benefit for large-scale CDNs is T

The website is also slow if the browser requests a resource from an origin that is very far away. Nothing is free. The typical benefit for large-scale CDNs is TTFB latency reduction, which tends to be felt rather acutely by users; and the cache improvements which happen on follow up requests. A big part of this for example is optimizing the TCP handshake (major providers have warmed backbones that skip the 3-way handshake across long paths, so users don't pay for 3xRTT across the Atlantic.) Nobody on this website ever mentions this fact because nobody here ever actually tests their sites under conditions like "the user has bad internet and is really far away from DigitalOcean NYC-3" > if there ever was a cache hit because a user visited one site then yours that coincidentally used the same CDN and query version This is not how modern browsers work anymore, and the phrasing makes think it isn't a rhetorical statement? > the user did not notice. ... That's kind of the whole point; they didn't think the website was slow. They didn't think anything. The website opened and then they went on using it. You do understand this, right?