CDN? A layman’s introduction to “content delivery networks”
In 2022 making sure your website is fast is essential. The speed that your website loads not only speaks to your businesses credibility, it also has a dramatic effect on your search engine ranking. Search engines like Google want their searches to have a seamless experience, so if they determine that your website takes too long to load, they are likely to direct their searches elsewhere.
The good news is there is plenty you can do to increase your websites loading speed and one of the simplest steps is to use a CDN. CDN stands for content delivery network and what it does is effectively copy your website to a series of different servers right across the globe. Then when a user accesses your website, it loads it from the nearest geographical server to ensure the site loads as quickly as possible.
For example, if I accessed your US based website from my home in Manchester, England, your website would load from a server in London not from a server across the Atlantic. This means it will load faster and more efficiently. It may only mean a difference of seconds, but the reality is that in 2020, seconds count.
A CDN works by Caching the static elements on your website and then loading them onto the various servers around the world. When a user accesses your site, the CDN first checks if their have been any changes made since the website was saved onto the remote servers. If there haven’t been any changes it simply loads the cached version. If there have been changes, it will update first, then load the website. This ensures that every user gets the latest version of your site, where ever it is they are accessing it from.
Reasons to Incorporate CDN in Your Business Website
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an effective way to speed up your website. Business owners now recognize the importance of this network of servers in delivering cached content from their website to users according to their geographic locations, content delivery edge server, and static content origin. But what are the exact reasons for website owners to consider using CDN?
Advantages of Using CDN for Website Owners
One of the greatest challenges in managing your own website is improving its performance. Users on your site are accessing the same server in order to see your content. However, if there’s a high volume of web traffic, the server will get overloaded and slow down the loading speed of your website.
According to CrazyEgg, a delay of one second in load time results to an 11 percent fewer views, 16 percent loss in customer satisfaction, and 7 percent decrease in conversions. The answer to this problem is having a CDN to ensure fast loading speed of your website. The following are the main reasons why you should have a CDN for your website:
- Improvement in search engine optimization. Major search engines like Google are very generous to websites that provide fast and efficient user experience. In other words, they prefer speed when ranking websites to appear in first page results. The faster your page load time, the more leads and higher sales you can acquire.
- Scalability against traffic spikes. CDN protects websites from high volumes of traffic, which affect responsiveness. Instead on the web server, static assets are processed from the content delivery network. As a result, you don’t serve static content from Node, ASP.NET, and other web application servers.
- Faster and more efficient performance. Since your content is physically hosted near the location of the users, it travels a shorter distance. Therefore, end users get faster loading page, which is made possible by CDN. All you need is to upload your file to the central server, then it will automatically distribute to other web servers across the globe.
- Very affordable service. With so many affordable CDN options available today, it’s easier to maintain your website. You can shop around in order to find great deals. There are options that allow customization in specific areas without breaking the bank. Whether you’re a blogger or a business owner, you can start out with easy-to-setup hosting sites that offer low-cost solutions.
- Crash-resistant website. A sudden influx of web visitors from social media platforms may cause your website to crash. Good thing proper caching setup and CDN help prevent this inconvenience by distributing traffic to more servers. Usually, websites that use one main server are prone to crashing due to overload.
Some of the most common types of businesses that benefit from CDN include e-commerce, technology and SaaS, mobile apps, publishing, and finance. With a standard way of interacting with a content delivery network, it helps end users and potential customers experience smoother web performance.
