DNS, CDN, and Web Performance in Algeria: Why Algerian Websites Are Still Slow Despite Growing Infrastructure

The Performance Problem Nobody Talks About

Open any Algerian government portal, local e-commerce site, or university website and watch the loading spinner. Then open a Moroccan or Tunisian equivalent. The difference is visceral. Algeria consistently ranks in the bottom quartile globally for web performance metrics, and the causes are both structural and fixable.

Google’s Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), which tracks real-world performance data from Chrome users, shows that Algerian website origins lag significantly behind global medians in passing all three Core Web Vitals thresholds (LCP, FID, CLS). While the global median hovers above 50%, Algeria falls well below — closer to where many developing markets sit. Morocco and Tunisia both outperform Algeria on these metrics, despite comparable device quality and increasingly similar mobile connectivity.

The puzzle deepens when you consider that Algeria’s 4G LTE coverage exceeds 75% of the population and mobile download speeds have improved substantially with network investment. The raw bandwidth is often sufficient for fast web experiences. The problem lies in the layers between the user’s browser and the server: DNS resolution, CDN utilization (or lack thereof), hosting infrastructure, and basic web optimization practices. Each layer adds latency, and in Algeria, most layers underperform.

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DNS Resolution: The First Bottleneck

Before a browser loads a single byte of content, it must resolve the domain name to an IP address. For most of the world, this takes 10-50 milliseconds thanks to nearby DNS resolver infrastructure. In Algeria, DNS resolution for .dz domains and locally hosted sites takes significantly longer, often several hundred milliseconds, particularly during peak usage hours.

The root cause is infrastructure placement and capacity. Algeria’s primary DNS infrastructure operates from servers concentrated in Algiers, with limited anycast distribution. The .dz country-code top-level domain, managed by CERIST (Centre de Recherche sur l’Information Scientifique et Technique), has improved its authoritative DNS infrastructure in recent years but still operates fewer points of presence than comparable ccTLDs. Morocco’s .ma, by comparison, leverages Anycast nodes distributed across multiple continents via partnerships with DNS operators like Netnod and PCH.

For sites relying on Algerie Telecom’s default DNS resolvers, additional latency accumulates from resolver capacity constraints during peak hours. Switching to public resolvers like Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 or Google’s 8.8.8.8 typically improves resolution times for Algerian users, though these resolvers are physically located in Marseille or nearby European cities, adding their own round-trip penalty. The optimal solution is local DNS resolver caches with sufficient capacity — something ARPT could mandate as a quality-of-service metric for ISPs.

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CDN Presence: Progress, but Fragile

The CDN landscape in Algeria has changed significantly. Cloudflare, the world’s most widely deployed CDN with over 330 cities across 120+ countries, now operates points of presence in Algiers (ALG), Annaba (AAE), and Constantine (CZL). This represents a meaningful improvement from just a few years ago when Algeria had no major CDN presence whatsoever. Morocco has Cloudflare PoPs in Casablanca, and Tunisia operates one in Tunis.

However, having PoPs and having reliable PoPs are two different things. Algeria’s CDN infrastructure has proven fragile. During the June 2025 Baccalaureate examination period, Algerian ISPs blocked Cloudflare IP ranges as part of broader internet restrictions to prevent exam cheating. These blocks persisted beyond the exam period, effectively disabling Cloudflare’s local PoPs and routing Algerian traffic back through European nodes in Marseille and Milan — adding 30-70 milliseconds of latency per request. For websites making 40-60 resource requests per page load (typical for modern sites), the cumulative impact was severe.

Beyond Cloudflare, the CDN landscape remains thin. Akamai, which operates over 4,100 PoPs globally, has no confirmed presence in Algeria. Amazon CloudFront, with 600+ edge locations worldwide, similarly has no confirmed Algerian nodes. This means that any site using a CDN other than Cloudflare still routes Algerian traffic to European servers, and even Cloudflare’s presence is subject to disruption by government internet policies.

The absence of redundant CDN options in Algeria remains a structural bottleneck. ARPT should actively engage CDN operators about expanding in-country presence, offering streamlined equipment import and peering arrangements at IXDZ (Algeria Internet Exchange Point). More critically, internet restriction policies that disable CDN infrastructure should account for the collateral damage to the broader digital economy.

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Local Hosting Quality and the .dz Ecosystem

For the Algerian websites that host locally rather than using international platforms, the hosting infrastructure itself is a performance bottleneck. Algeria’s hosting market is served by providers including ICOSNET, Djaweb (Algerie Telecom’s subsidiary), and a handful of smaller operators. Data center infrastructure has improved, but server configurations, storage performance, and network peering arrangements often lag international standards.

Common issues identified through WebPageTest and Lighthouse audits of popular .dz sites include: uncompressed assets (no gzip or Brotli encoding), unoptimized images (JPEG instead of WebP/AVIF, no responsive sizing), no HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 support, missing cache headers, render-blocking JavaScript in the document head, and SSL/TLS configurations using outdated cipher suites that slow handshake times.

Informal audits of top .dz websites by Algerian web developers have consistently found median Lighthouse performance scores in the 20-30 range out of 100 on mobile, with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) times exceeding 7-8 seconds — far above Google’s “good” threshold of 2.5 seconds. These are not hardware problems; they are configuration and optimization problems that can be fixed without infrastructure investment.

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A Practical Fix-Priority List for Algerian Web Operators

The performance gap can be closed. Not every fix requires regulatory reform or infrastructure investment. Here is a priority-ordered list, from highest impact per effort to lowest.

Priority 1 (Immediate, zero cost): Enable gzip/Brotli compression on web servers. Convert images to WebP format. Add proper cache-control headers. Move render-blocking scripts to async/defer loading. These changes alone can cut LCP by 40-60% and require only server configuration changes.

Priority 2 (Low cost, high impact): Deploy Cloudflare (or another CDN) for static assets. With Cloudflare PoPs now in Algiers, Annaba, and Constantine, the performance benefit is substantial when the PoPs are operational. Use DNS prefetching and preconnect hints to reduce resolution overhead for third-party resources.

Priority 3 (Medium investment): Upgrade hosting to support HTTP/2 or HTTP/3. Implement a modern TLS configuration (TLS 1.3, OCSP stapling). Deploy server-side rendering or static site generation for content-heavy sites instead of client-rendered JavaScript frameworks.

Priority 4 (Policy and infrastructure): ARPT should engage Akamai and other CDN operators about in-country PoP deployment. ISPs should deploy local DNS resolver caches with adequate capacity. CERIST should expand .dz authoritative DNS anycast distribution. Government internet restriction policies should minimize collateral impact on CDN infrastructure.

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Sources & Further Reading

• Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) — Google
• Cloudflare Global Network and Data Center Locations — Cloudflare
• Cloudflare Status — Algeria PoPs (ALG, AAE, CZL)
• Exam-Time Internet Disruptions in Algeria — Cloudflare Blog
• CERIST .dz Domain Registry — CERIST
• Algeria Speedtest Global Index — Ookla
• Web Performance Optimization Guide — web.dev
• Lighthouse Performance Scoring — Google