To accelerate content delivery, Speed Kit intercepts requests made by the browser and reroutes them: Instead of loading content from the original source, the browser fetches data from Baqend's fast infrastructure.
The following schematic illustrates how Speed Kit works.
To activate Speed Kit, you simply include a Speed Kit JS snippet into your website which we generate for you. Whenever a user is visiting your website, the snippet then launches the Speed Kit Service Worker, a process running concurrently to the main thread of execution in your browser. As soon as the Service Worker is active, all HTTP requests matching your speedup policies (whitelist, blacklist, etc.) are rerouted to Baqend. If we have a cached copy of the requested resource (Media, Text, etc.), it is served superfast; if the resource is requested for the first time from our caches, it is served as fast as the origin allows – but will be cached and fast from thereon.
To avoid stale data, Speed Kit's caches have to be updated whenever your content changes. For this purpose, we provide a convenient refresh API that allows you to update all caches (including the browser caches which are located on the user's device). This can be done both in real-time and in a scheduled fashion.
For additional details on Speed Kit and the technology it is built on, see our in-depth technical survey.
With Speed Kit, you get all the advantages of a CDN; in fact, Speed Kit uses a CDN under the hood. In addition, however, you also get the following benefits:
- Your website becomes a Progressive Web App by default, i.e. users can keep using the website even if they lose their Internet connection temporarily.
- Speed Kit can cache dynamic content such as your HTML file or user comments in addition to static content such as stylesheets or images; you decide how often Speed Kit refreshes its copy!
- Speed Kit uses the browser cache which is located in the user's device: Thus, Speed Kit serves data even faster than common CDN caches.
What will happen, if the Speed Kit infrastructure becomes unavailable?
Don't worry! Speed Kit will disable itself automatically when there is any kind of error or outage. Thus, your website will behave as usual – only without acceleration. In the background, Speed Kit will perform health checks and reenable itself again as soon as the problem has been resolved.