Self-Hosting of External Domains: Enable self-hosting to boost your performance

Introduction

Do you use resources (scripts, images, JS or CSS files) hosted on third-party domains?

Fasterize's self-hosting feature allows you to host them yourself—that is, to serve them directly from your own domain. The result: fewer external requests, faster loading times, and a better user experience.

Let’s take a look at how it works, why you should use it, and how to easily enable it in Fasterize.

What is self-hosting?

Self-hosting involves automatically rewriting the URLs of external resources so that they are served from your site’s main domain.

For example:

• An image originally hosted on content.site.fr will become:
• https://www.mon-site.fr/fstrz/r/s/content-site.fr

This is also known as domain unsharding: instead of splitting the domain into multiple parts (sharding), resources are centralized into a single domain.

💡 Tip: Fewer domains = fewer DNS lookups = faster-loading pages.

Why enable self-hosting?

Enabling self-hosting offers several benefits in terms of web performance:

• Fewer DNS lookups: the browser no longer needs to resolve multiple domains.
• Better prioritization: self-hosted resources are served more quickly, without competing with other traffic.
• Reduced loading time: critical resources are available sooner.

⚠️ Note: Only URLs included in the HTML are modified. Resources called via third-party scripts are not modified.

How do I enable self-hosting on the Fasterize console?

Open the Fasterize console

1. Access the Self-Hosting app
2. Enable the feature
3. List the external domains to self-host

Fasterize will automatically rewrite the corresponding URLs.

Example of a rewrite

💡 You can choose not to enable self-hosting for your primary domain.

This avoids having to rewrite your own URLs, for example:

https://www.mon-site.fr/fstrz/r/s/www.mon-site.fr

Result: an immediate improvement in web performance

When resources are hosted on a different domain, the browser treats them as secondary. As a result, they are not prioritized correctly and compete for bandwidth.

With self-hosting:

• Your critical resources are delivered sooner
• The Fasterize cache can be fully utilized
• Loading performance has been significantly improved

📚 For more on this topic: Page Load Speed and Third-Party Scripts: Impact and Optimization

Conclusion

Self-hosting is a powerful way to improve your site's speed, especially if you use a lot of third-party resources. With just a few clicks, you can reduce external dependencies and make the browser's job easier.

Enable it now in your Fasterize dashboard and see the difference!

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