How to reference CDN images in a stylesheet which may use HTTPS?

Question

I have all my site images setup to serve from Amazon's Cloudfront CDN. If my pages will sometimes be served as both HTTP and HTTPS, then should I make all image paths HTTPS to the CDN?

Is this a poor practice?

Any other ideas?

Answer 1

Changing a path to HTTPS requires that the server in question supports SSL. (Try it on a site that doesn't and you'll see the error.) Last I checked (which is to say, here) Amazon Cloudfront does not support SSL. S3 (Amazon's full-blown storage service) does.

An alternative option, of course, is to host your secure images locally. I'm assuming that your secure pages (checkout, etc) aren't going to be experiencing quite the same level of traffic that your cached pages do.

And even if you have the option of serving all of your content via HTTPS, you should take into account the performance implications of using SSL.