What Is a Content Delivery Network and How Using One Can Help?

For websites, there are a couple of important things, including great website design, quality SEO practices, content, user experience, and many other aspects including website speed. Users hate slow websites, it’s as simple as that. In the fast-paced digital age we live in, where there are countless similar websites, no visitor will have the patience to wait for a site to load. They would rather visit another site.

Still, many people think that the only thing that affects a website’s speed is the web hosting package they have. Although it’s true that quality hosting can improve your speed, there is also another way that you can speed up your site – with a content delivery network.

No matter how good your hosting is, if the server on which your site is hosted is far away from your location, the speed will drop. Sending requests to sites takes time and it takes longer for the requests to be processed and returned to the site. This is an issue that can be dealt with a CDN.

Defining CDN

Simply put, a content delivery network is a large system of servers that are located all around the world. These servers are designed to deal with website content and they can do many actions with it, from storing cached site versions, different type of files, web apps, or basically any other type of content that can be used with websites.

The providers of content delivery networks strategically place all of their servers to create a system that can be efficient and deliver data very quickly throughout the whole world. No matter where a website is located and where the request is sent from, the system directs it to the closest server. Through this network, the responses are received far more quickly.

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Do you need a CDN?

Most website operators suggest that every website that wants good speed and the ability to take a lot of traffic should have a CDN. After all, there are millions of websites which are currently using CDN services to maximize their performance and speed. More importantly, a great percentage of the 10k most successful websites use CDN, showing that this is an important service.

One of the reasons for this is that user experience has become an imperative in the digital world. The only way to compete in the global online market is to create a web presence that works fast, smooth, and gives customers an amazing experience overall, making them stay loyal.

A CDN system can be used for any kind of website, no matter if it’s a blog, eCommerce store, or business site. It also offers the same benefits to all sites using it, no matter if they are big or small. There are different services depending on the platform such as WordPress CDN, Joomla CDN, etc.

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CDN website benefits

Now that we’ve talked about some general benefits of CDNs, let’s dig a little deeper and explore all of the benefits a website can have from this kind of service.

Better load time

One of the most important things for website user is how fast the pages open. Luckily, a content delivery network can reduce the loading time drastically. Numbers indicate that a CDN system can reduce the load time by up to 40%.

Website backups

As we mentioned earlier, these systems focus on content and they can hold cached website versions. These versions can be used to backup a website when downtime occurs. Not only can visitors continue to use this version until your website is up and running again, but it can be used permanently in case your website is lost.

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No slowing down

A website can work smoothly when there is little traffic overall, but in case of traffic surges they can drastically slow down. CDNs are designed to handle requests efficiently and even when there is high traffic on a site, it will work at the same speed.

A CDN offers many benefits and websites that use them are overall much better. Still, this doesn’t mean that getting any CDN service will help you. You need to find a good CDN provider and do your research when opting for these services. A CDN can be implemented very quickly into any website, so don’t worry if you have a large site with a big audience, as you won’t lose any momentum if you get one.

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