Amazon (AWS) CloudFront CDN and W3 Total Cache Tutorial 

This is the most comprehensive tutorial among the others. Thanks!

Man, you helped me out big time for a part of my college project which I left for the last minute. So many other tutorials where they overcomplicate things, and you made it super easy!

Thanks so much - this makes perfect sense and SO much easier than setting it up in the AWS Dashboard. Like you say... "let W3 Total Cache do all the heavy lifting." Genius!

Really great video. You make it very simple to understand!

Hey I wanted to reach out and say thanks! Your tutorial helped me navigate Amazon and W3!

Thank you - excellent video, clear to follow.

Truly a 10 minute solution! Thanks so much!

This was really helpful with no-nonsense.

This helped me in March 30, 2021. Great job..

I really appreciate the videos. One thing perhaps you would consider, is a W3 Total Cache tutorial? I'm sifting through painful and largely rubbish setup tutorials. Clearly you know how to communicate and explain setups better than most anyone out there. Thank you.

no bs straight to the point. thanks

Excellent video - very clear, easy to follow - and relevant.

Man thank you, thank you and thank you I have been trying to solve this problem for a day and a half you helped a lot thank you ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

thank you. simple, easy to follow and it worked perfectly.

Hey Craig, thanks for creating a very helpful guide on how add to amazon cdn. I was planning yo buy one from max or cloud flare. Have just installed one on my site, lets see the result.

You did a great job! it was so easy to set up a CDN this way! Thanks for your hard work!

thank you for the video!

Thank you so much for sharing it! It helped me a lot!

Still works in april 2020, Thanks!

Thanks a lot, I was making a simple mistake which took me 2 hours to diagnose and luckily this video made my day... now my website load time ROCKS. Thanks again.

clear step for setup caching. thanks lot

dude thank you so much, im really willing to watch more useful content from you, cheers to your brewing website, interested into start brewing too.

Thanks So much for Information

Nice video. Very helpful. Thanks!

It working. thanks

thank you !!

Thanks a bunch

what a great video

Thanks Bro! you helped me a lot 👍

good work

Cheers bro,

Awesome video, very clear and concise. My problem... My 'test cloudFront distribution' passed however my images still are being served from my local WP install (mydomain/image1.jpg). What did I do wrong?

Hi I have woocommerce, how do I make it not upload and cache the cart, my account and checkout sections? I read if these are cached then customers will have problem buying products from my site. Can you kindly guide me on this. Many thanks

Any idea why Amazon Cloudfront is not selectable in W3 total cache? It seems that it wants me to signup with MAxCDN.

the best

this is ok but why aren't images and stuff appearing in the s3 bucket?

What is the use of creating s3 bucket. I didn't see anything in that bucket?

If my app / web site consists of SQL 2005, how do I connect to that??? Do you have links that refer AWS CDM to this type of build?

You dont need S3 bucket for Pull mode. All you need is a user with AWSAdmin rights policy attached to it (no S3 policy required). Then enter access keys of that user in W3 total cache dashboard under CDN section

Still works in 2020

can you do an updated video of cloudfront and w3 total cache. ?

best tutorial ever !! I have tried many other tutorial on YT and broke my theme several times. Thanks so much btw : could you please explain in detail the Cname function, I broke the theme while adding it. Also why setting up a bucket ? it seems to be empty ? Many thanks

I have to comment here about an issue for this: Basically this tutorial doesn't use the S3 storage at all to store the data from the Wordpress site that is why it is mentioned that additional steps are not required when changing the settings inside W3 Total Cache plugin. I wanted to try this and confirm for myself so I deleted all my S3 storages from the AWS and everything still worked, also what I could see inside the 'Origin' section of the distribution, there is a different (auto-suggest dropdown) to choose an S3 storage (if it currently exists), so just so you know that even though this works it doesn't use the S3 storage space for the files but instead probably gets them from your site and makes CDN to deliver them through it instead but your site still has them on your own server and not S3 storage. Hope this helps, and please comment/reply to this if I am mistaken.

hey i dont know if the settings have changed for aws, but when i setup like the way you shown on the video, none of the wp contents are pulled to my s3 bucket. is there a step missing?

after i did this some icons like the search icon are just gonne or changed , what can i do to solve that?

Does anyone know if the key is encrypted in the WP database. So if someone were to hack the Wordpress site they couldn't get an admin key? Is there a more restrictive permissions level then admin on IAM that will keep Cloudfront working?

Hey, I followed this with a wordpress site hosted in AWS, the tutorial is great but when I click the final "save settings and purge cache" it takes the whole site offline by causing a 502 error. Disabling the w3 plugin fixed the issue, but now there is no CDN, I was wondering if you / anyone in the comment had come across this?

@craigerson Everything is working on my end. quick question, does this actually move the media files off the hosting server and on too the amazon s3? for example everytime i upload images it will be using amazon s3 and not the hosting SSD space

Is this also what u are supposed to do when u get System information disabled due to load higher than 1.0 all the time??

Nice tutorial. Is it necessary to setup bucket policy, using your guidelines?

Hi Craigerson, very good tutorial! Thank you so much, a quick question. If I added more content to the site after I did all of this shown in the video, will the newly added content be automatically distributed through CloudFront? Thank you!

Hi i'm using w3 total cache , it's not clearing woocommerce product data after updating product information also , it's showing old data only, if i clicked empty all caches button also, it's showing old product information.

Splendid video. I have a question. How do I add a subfolder WordPress install in the same CloudFront instance as the main domain? An example I have WordPress install xyz.com with a CloudFront instance. I want to add xyz.com/subfolder WordPress install too in the same instance. BTW I forgot the original secret key so I have to create a new user? If I do, how will I connect the new user to the CloudFront instance?

This is very helpful and not convoluted at all, thank you! I do have a question after following the instructions in your video and all going well, I'm confused as to why create an S3 bucket? When I look at my bucket, it is empty. Isn't AWS/Cloudfront supposed to "pull" all your WP site files, images, etc into the bucket? Did I miss something? I see the images on my site have the cloudfront url, so it is working. Also testing site speed doesn't seem to improve much if at all after doing all this.

Hello I think i am late, but thank you for great tutorial, can you help me a bit? I tested this on my staging site and now i have 401 code, how can I bypass that without authorization?

Thanks for the awesome tutorial. Can you please assist with my issue? I have a woocommerce wordpress website with few products at the moment. Is W3 Total cashe alone sufficient to load content to CDN, even in this case? Or are there any additional plugins or steps required to match this tutorial for a ecommerce website? Cheers!

Worked great, one problem. I named my bucket www.mydomainname.com and everything worked perfect. However, when I decided to enable 'Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration' to improve my load time even more, Amazon said it cannot enable this feature for buckets that have (.) periods in them, like my domain name. My question is, If I do the entire process over per your video, creating new keys and a new bucket without periods in the name, and change the keys in W3 Total Cache, will the site upload without issues to the new bucket, now that everything is already being delivered by another bucket? Basically, can I simply follow your video, create all new, and then just change the keys in W3TC, or will the new bucket try pulling data from the original bucket, causing problems? Thanks for any help.

oh, I can not find the performance in wordpress. where is it?

Great Video! Really helpful, thanks! I have a question: Is it possible to set 2 websites using the same AWS cloudfront account? If so can you please explain how? Many thanks in advance.

Great tutorial! Thank you for this! I check on this but I get stuck on creating CloudFront distribution using W3 Total Cache plugin. Do I need to change any permission on AWS?

I have a question. If we create more pages and posts and added more media on wordpress after doing this procedure, would the new data automatically add to the aws bucket or will we need to do all of this again?

Where was the S3 bucket used in all these setup ? After the bucket was created there was no more reference to this through-out the video. Am I missing something ?

Great video, question will this work for video content within WordPress, If I create a video playlist, do the CloudFront link to the video need to be within the video playlist?

Hello Craigerson, I do have one question concerning this. I have done everything as you HOWEVER, my S3 bucket remains empty. When I tested the webpage on some sites for testing the loading such as google speed test, it tells me all okay now. Images are not shown in a recommendation to use caching for them since they are static, I assume because I already do use caching because i did everything as you said? However, S3 bucket is empty. Completely. I noticed that AWS changed their interface when creating the bucket, and it asked me about some permissions. By default it was all disabled. Hmmm Wonder if that is the reason? If the bucket isn't getting anything in and out of it, then could it be that the cloud front is loading things off of my server? Would this mean that cloud front can accelerate your website, irrelevant of whether it reads from your server or your S3 bucket? Please assist, if indeed it is the problem with S3 permissions, what should I do? Should I adjust the S3 permissions so that wordpress can somehow save stuff in it. I tested something, I uploaded something in media in my wordpress, and it did NOT appear in my s3 bucket. Please assist, thank you so much for this video.

what about setting up, cloudfront with orgin of ec2 instance? how does that work. This method would just cache images? how to cache my whole blog?

This worked except it has disabled some functions on my website that are offered through a 3rd party company for booking classes. Any idea why enabling a CDN would affect this? I can't figure out what to do about it. Please help!

thanks for this amazing video...My website is using a custom ssl so whenever I try your method it breaks the website and I have tried waiting for one whole day but the website stays broke Can you please create a video or tell me if someone is using a custom ssl what he should do?

My website broke. Content Delivery Network object support via Amazon Cloudfront is currently enabled and not authorized. Content Delivery Network full-site-delivery support via None is currently disabled and not authorized.

another thing i didn't understand the upload and display routine . so after we set all this account. now lets say i want to embed photo or video it's will be running from wp or from s3 panel? hope you will do a video about the workflow after the setting

at domain name 10:54 i see my domain mention as .cloudfront.net and not my actual domain so i done something wrong?

how easy is it to make changes on your site? will it update CDN automatically? Thinking of doing this to one of my sites

Awesome Explanation buddy....i spent a whole night configuring with cloudfront push via w3 total cache, although i did it easily first, but unfortunately it broke the css, logo broken, icon broken, fonts broken....etc...figuring out just blew my head up...somehow managed to bring back logo but this time logo size has increased, nav menu came beneath the logo breaking the alignment...no luck with icons yet.... Well noticed by default in w3 total cahce plugin in "Theme file types to upload": *.otf,*.woff,* semi colon is missing.... edited it still its not coming correct....at last came through this video and decided to shift to cloudfront pull via w3 total cache.... i would appreciate if you make a video on cloudfront push...and find out reason why css, icons etc breaks down......Great Video..

Font missing

can i use cloudflare in the same time?

as clean as it could be. though still couldn't understand the use of S3 here.

Why have you created a bucket if are using cloudfront pull?

is this setting uo a cdn for free lifetime ?

damn this just straight destroyed my site lmao thankfully i have backup

It’s so sad you left RU-vid :(

@craigerson. Great tutorial how to add metadata about cache expiry. www.webpagetest.org/result/190611_CB_9a1c542b0563fb49b5511a3d309da444/1/performance_optimization/ website: www.wrecky.com.au/cash-for-cars/ Getting these error on speedtest. FAILED - (No max-age or expires) on images.

Why on earth would you need to create an S3 bucket? You hosting your site off AWS? If not, then there is no purpose to create an S3 bucket. Not only that, you've missed a ton loads of other steps that need to be configured before any of this would work.

this is horrible way of doing it as you giving full access IAM role via this plugin . Not secure