Start here (CDN)

Welcome! This guide helps new users like you get started with Fastly's Full-Site Delivery as quickly as possible. Whether you run a WordPress site that gets a couple thousand impressions per month or an enterprise web application that receives millions of page views per day, we want to help your websites and apps perform faster, safer, and at global scale. We want to help you get the most out of Fastly's Edge Cloud platform.

1. Create an account

Sign up for a Fastly account if you haven't done so already. There's no obligation and you can test up to $50 of traffic for free.

1. Point a browser to the signup form.

2. When the signup form appears, fill in all the fields with your contact information. All the fields are required.

   NOTE

   Ensure you enter your email address correctly as it can't be changed after signup. Without a valid email we can't send you account verification details during account setup. Without a valid telephone number, we can't assist you with specific kinds of account lockout issues. You'll be able to change your password any time after signup.

3. Click Create my account. The confirmation screen will appear with instructions on what to do next and you'll be sent an e-mail that contains a verification link.

4. Check your inbox for the confirmation email we sent you and click the email confirmation link. The account sign in page appears (we need to make sure you're not a spam robot and verify your email).

5. Fill in the Email and Password fields to log in to your new account. A getting started page appears, showing you how to get started with Fastly and showing you important areas of the web interface.

2. Create and activate your first service

Once you've created an account and you're logged in, familiarize yourself with our web interface so you can get more comfortable playing with configuration settings. Consult our guide on web interface controls for more information.

You'll be working with a service: a set of caching rules and settings for your website or application. Services are version controlled so you can always roll back to a previous version of a service. Our guide on working with services provides more information.

You only need two things to create your first service: a domain name and an origin server. Your domain name is what people type in a web browser to locate you (such as www.example.com). Don't worry — adding a domain name won't have any impact on your production traffic until you change your DNS records. We recommend that you don't use apex or second-level domains with Fastly. For example, you should use www.example.com and not example.com.

You need to connect your Fastly service to an origin server so we can cache your content. You'll sometimes see the origin referred to as a host or backend server. Your origin server is whatever cloud service or web server that contains the content of your website or application. Fastly caches the content stored on your origin server at points of presence (POPs) around the world.

There are a few service settings we have enabled by default. We recommend reviewing these settings and deciding whether or not to disable them by clicking the appropriate setting switch to Off. You can also disable them after you've created your service. Our guide on working with services provides more information about these default settings.

Now for the fun part: activating your service. Activation might sound scary, but it won't have any impact on your production traffic. Our instructions on activating versions of services provide more information.

3. Test your service

After your service is activated, you can test that it's working. Click the Test domain link on the Domains page to check how your website or application loads with Fastly. See our testing setup details for more information.

If you need to make additional changes to your service, click the Edit configuration button and then select the option to clone the active version. You can edit this version and then activate it when you're ready to save the changes.

4. Go beyond the basics

Congratulations! You've successfully configured Fastly to cache your content. But before you go live, take a look at some other features you can enable. After all, you've only just started discovering what Fastly is capable of doing. You can test and experiment with configurations safely without impacting any traffic to your origin (traffic won’t flow there until you update your DNS records).

To make additional changes to your service, click the Edit configuration button and then select the option to clone the active version. You can edit this version and then activate it when you're ready to save the changes. As you experiment with service configurations, you can test their success by opening http://www.example.com.global.prod.fastly.net in a new browser window (be sure to replace www.example.com with your own website's domain name). Your website should appear, though it may take up to 60 seconds for new configuration settings to take effect.

This section provides an overview of some of our most popular features. Of course, it's up to you to pick and choose which of these to enable, if any.

Enable automatic compression

Fastly's automatic compression feature dynamically fetches content from origin, compresses it, and then caches it. Compression is a simple, effective way to save bandwidth and speed up your site. See our guide on enabling automatic compression for more information. Consider using Brotli for better compression and performance.

Configure shielding

By designating a Fastly POP to serve as a shield for your origin server, you can increase the cache hit rates for your Fastly service and potentially protect your origin server from unexpected spikes in requests for content. See our guide on shielding to learn how to enable origin shielding.

Serve stale content

Fastly can optionally serve stale content when there is a problem with your origin server or if it's taking a long time to fetch new content from your origin server. For example, if Fastly can't reach your origin server, our POPs can continue to serve cached content when users request it. See our guides on serving stale content and staleness and revalidation to learn how to enable this feature.

Set up health checks

Health checks monitor the status of your hosts. Fastly performs health checks on your origin server based on a check frequency setting and the packaged offering you may have purchased. To learn how to enable this feature, read our guide on working with health checks. Health checks are typically used in conjunction with the serving stale content and failover features.

Configure custom responses

Fastly can send custom responses for certain requests that you don't want to reach your origin server. For example, you can configure responses for a robots.txt file and 404 and 503 error pages. See our guide on custom responses that don't hit origin servers for more information.

Use conditions

You can use conditions to control how requests are processed. Conditions add logic to any basic configuration object in a service and control if and when that object is applied. See our about conditions guide for more information.

Set up streaming logs

To help you tune the performance of your Fastly service, we support real-time log streaming of data that passes through Fastly. We support a number of protocols that allow you to stream logs to a variety of locations, including third-party services, for storage and analysis. See our guide on setting up remote log streaming to learn how to set up streaming logs.

Embed Fastly in your application

Your application can use Fastly's API to programmatically interact with our products and features. Check out our list of API clients to get started. We also have a command line tool you can use to interact with the Fastly API.

Start using VCL

Fastly allows you create complex and specialized configurations using Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) files. See our guides on VCL Snippets and custom VCL for more information. We also provide examples and tutorials with step-by-step code examples to help you learn as you go.

5. Set up TLS

We recommend securing traffic between Fastly and your customers using Transport Layer Security (TLS). See our instructions on serving HTTPS traffic using Fastly-managed certificates for more information.

6. Go live

You've added a domain name, connected an origin server, tested your service, and added extras. Now it's time to go live. To move production traffic to Fastly, you need to modify your CNAME DNS records to point to Fastly. See our adding CNAME records guide for more information. This is a good time to enable HTTP/3 and IPv6 support.

7. Purge content

When you make a change to your site, you have to purge the cached content to force Fastly to fetch the new content from your origin server. You can do this manually or programmatically. See our purging guides for more information.

What's next

Start experimenting with Fastly's Full-Site Delivery by following along with Introduction to Fastly's CDN, a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to use Fastly with an example website and domain name. It guides you through the steps of caching and delivering a static website using the Jekyll static site generator, Amazon AWS, and the Fastly CDN.

Explore other products and services

CDN is only one of many products offered by Fastly. We encourage you to explore some of our other products and services like Compute, image optimization, security, streaming delivery, and Next-Gen WAF.