The success of any website revolves around delivering content quickly and efficiently. In the world of internet, distance matters. Data travel very long distances to reach your browser. The longer the travel, the slower the delivery. Recent survey results indicate that internet users expect your website to load in less than 2 seconds. That’s why it’s important to use variety of tools to increase your website speed.
Hence, website load time is always a worry for website owners. This is where CDN plays an important role in speeding up your content delivery. In this article, we’ll look at what is CDN all about and why it is important to your website.
What is CDN?
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that distributes static content to the website. It is basically a cluster of servers that is distributed geographically and ensures quick transfer of static content including, images, videos, CSS, javascript files etc.
It’s a fact that website speed is majorly impacted by the web hosting company that we use. However, CDN can help in minimizing the inefficiency of a web hosting by increasing your website speed by hosting your website file closest to your website visitors. In addition, web hosting companies like SiteGround provide free third party CDN with their web hosting packages. Check out this SiteGround review from Inlinehostblogger more info on that.
When it comes to CDN services, some of the popular names include Amazon, Cloudflare, Rackspace, Google Cloud, Akamai etc. These CDN providers have their servers distributed all over the globe. Hence, no matter where ever you are located, content will be delivered from the closest possible servers to your location.
In simple words, CDN can be described as the backbone of content delivery for your website. Popular websites make use of CDN to speed up the performance of the website.
How does a CDN work?
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is primarily used to decrease the distance between the website visitor and the server. In a content delivery network, servers are distributed geographically across the globe. Each location in the network is referred to as the Point of Presence (PoP). Every PoP contains many caching servers ready to deliver to content for clients close to their location.
For example, if a visitor accesses your website from a location in London, United Kingdom, then the CDN forwards the user to a PoP present in UK. Hence, the content is delivered quickly.
When you compare a content delivery to London from a server residing in the US to a server in London, it is quite prudent that London server can deliver content much faster.
Benefits of using CDN
Content Delivery Network (CDN) provides a lot of advantages as described below:
Faster Performance
The higher the performance of your website, larger the sales. Hence, websites looking to boost their sales and conversion rate will look to improve their website performance.
Just a few seconds is enough for a customer to come at a decision to place an order or exit the website. This is where CDN plays a vital role in speeding up the content delivery.
Save Costs
To speed up your website content delivery, you don’t need to worry about your infrastructure, as CDN takes care of all that. All you need to do is subscribe to a CDN service and it will take care of distributing the content based on the user’s location. Businesses are no longer required to spend money on separate servers across the globe, as the CDN services will take care of that. It literally means, it saves data center costs for several servers along with resource cost to manage those servers.
Availability
Since the assets are distributed geographically, a PoP (Point of Presence) in a single location like London, will have reduced load when compared with a single server catering to the needs of all users across the globe. Hence, with CDN, you can ensure 100% availability for your website even during high-volume traffic and power outages.
File Download
One of the major advantages of CDN is that file downloads are made much easier and quicker. Since the file is downloaded from a server close to your location, the file transfer is quick. If you see that if a file takes a long time to download, one reason behind the slowness could be the absence of CDN.
No Downtime
Even during cases, when one of your servers goes down, or if the CDN detects the server not responding to your requests, CDN will automatically starts serving content from its local cache.
With normal servers, whenever there is a downtime, you need to wait till the service provider or some technical person to fix that. Your website will stay down during that time.
While you are browsing your website, CDN works in the background and caches your pages. When the server goes down, CDN redirects your website to these cached pages. Hence, your customers won’t see a 404-page error or a server down message.
DDos Protection
DDos (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are a major headache for many website owners. These attacks not only cause a huge impact on the reputation of the website, but also brings the website down or slow downs the website. Enterprises and ecommerce companies are spending a huge amount of money in minimizing the effects or preventing these DDoS attacks. With the increased adoption of CDN, these attacks have been brought to a large extent.
With CDN in place, the attacks are stopped before it reaches your main data hub or datacenter. CDN’s will ensure the servers affected by these attacks are pulled down and other servers will continue delivering the data. Hence, your website doesn’t face major breakdowns or slowness.
Analytics
CDNs are not only used just for speedy content delivery, but they also help in providing detailed analytical information to enterprises. With CDN, you can get a detailed report of the strengths and weaknesses of your sales. CDNs provide real-time statistics on website load, active zones and popular products etc. These details will offer great help in increasing the performance by addressing the problem areas and thereby boosting your sales.
Conclusion
Adoption of CDNs have become a growing trend amongst online businesses as it ensures optimal performance and security. A high-performance website not only builds reputation amongst its customers, but also boosts your sales and revenue by a large extent. Hence, if your website is suffering from slow delivery and sales, then it is high time you need to switch over to CDN now. Consider reading some SiteGround reviews about how to enable CDN for your website to improve your website stability and speed.
