Static assets served from CDN with geographic edge caching

An origin server in us-east-1 adds 150–300ms of network latency for users in APAC or Europe before a single byte of content arrives (ISO-25010 time-behaviour). A CDN with geographic edge caching eliminates that latency by serving cached responses from the PoP nearest the user. Separately, static assets served without Cache-Control: immutable, max-age=31536000 are re-validated on every visit, incurring a conditional request round-trip even when the asset has not changed. Both issues compound on high-traffic pages.

Configure aggressive cache headers for versioned static assets in next.config.ts:

// next.config.ts
const config = {
  async headers() {
    return [
      {
        source: '/_next/static/:path*',
        headers: [
          {
            key: 'Cache-Control',
            value: 'public, max-age=31536000, immutable'
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}
export default config

Verify CDN is active by checking response headers for a CDN-specific header:

curl -sI https://yoursite.com | grep -i 'x-vercel-cache\|cf-cache-status\|x-cache'
# HIT = served from CDN edge; MISS = reached origin

For self-hosted deployments without a built-in CDN, place Cloudflare (free tier sufficient) or AWS CloudFront in front of your origin. Ensure the CDN's cache rules allow caching of static assets.