9 Reasons For Improving Your Website With A Content Delivery Network (CDN)

What Is A Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

Suppose your website is hosted on a physical data center, such as in London’s Docklands. In that case, this is your “hosting server.”

For visitors from Tokyo, Japan who visit your website will take longer to load than if they came from, say, Watford, Hertfordshire. The reason for this is the data will have to travel a longer distance.

This data speed is called latency which is the time and delays involved in data transmission over a network. The latency increases as the distance between two points widen.

What Makes A CDN?

A CDN is a network of servers located around the world that assist conventional web hosting in delivering rich and high-quality multimedia content securely and cost-effectively.

These servers are strategically positioned around the world to speed up the delivery of static web content.

A CDN does not replace a website but is more like an add-on service to enhance your website’s speed and the content you publish.

The Content Delivery Network is a third-party solution, which allows your website to “pass” through its servers.

The Benefits

1. Having Your Server In Each Country Around The World

Say if you have just launched a website and offer a few downloads or products to sell, this is a manageable amount.

However, you are now offering thousands of downloads/products and reaching a bigger audience worldwide. You could have your website hosted in every country, but that would be expensive. Instead, you can use a CDN, a set of servers located in various locations worldwide.

This would be like having your hosting server in each location worldwide but for a fraction of the cost.

As a result, the CDN was created to reduce the physical distance between a website’s user and its hosting- Fig 1
Fig 1

2. The Big Brands use them

Many websites already use CDNs to handle the bulk of their traffic. This can result in savings for your hosting company.

Many companies provide a CDN, some free to use, such as Cloudflare, my preferred choice as they offer a free and paid version. Other companies include:

Akamai

Amazon (AWS)

Microsoft

KeyCDN

Who Uses What?

A CDN is used by over 50% of the top 1,000 websites.

3. CDN Will Increase Website Speeds

Many people use a CDN because it is a simple way to increase website speed while also lowering latency. Since most websites and applications that people interact with daily are run from a single physical location, the content on such sites and applications (such as photos, text, and video) must also travel over wires to the rest of the world.

Web and smartphone users who are used to real-time digital interactions are frustrated by slow loading websites.

• 25% of users would leave a website that takes more than four seconds to load.
• A mobile site that takes more than five seconds to load will lose 74% of its visitors.
• 46% of users will not return to a failing website.

Fig 2
Source

The use of CDN to reduce page load times would also result in fewer bounce rates and more page views which can be seen from your analytics dashboard.

This leads to increased sales conversions.

Every aspect of your website should be streamlined, from the homepage to the marketing funnel and finally to the checkout or contact us page.
You are ensuring that your assets are delivered quickly through your entire funnel by using a CDN.

4 Improved SEO With A CDN

One of the ranking factors for SEO is improved page speeds; just how fast your website is can be measured here. Google has stated that a slow-loading website will be penalized for its ranking. So the quicker your website loads, the higher your chances of climbing the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) See Fig 3

Fig 3- Google SERPs Example Page

5. CND Is affordable

Some CDN providers, such as Cloudflare, offer a free tier service, which you can upgrade to for improved performance if required. Other providers charge monthly fees or by the amount of data running through their CDN platform. Prices can start from £10 per month with setup up costs are usually a one of payment.

6. Improved Reliability

At times your website may go down at some stage, which can be highly inconvenient. A CDN, on the other hand, offers stability due to the way its architecture is set up. Requests to your website are often redirected to the nearest accessible POP (where a CDN provider has its server located).
If one CDN is unavailable, it forwards the request to the next available server, resulting in less downtime and a better web experience

7. Maintains Stability In Increased Traffic Volume To Your Website

When it comes to the web, you never know when you could get a traffic spike. For Example, this could happen from a popular news site review and go viral and for your host to surprise you with a hefty bill or a coverage fee.
A CDN can help you avoid that issue.

Since your website’s content takes an enormous load off your hosting server. With most resources now being delivered via the content distribution network, your server doesn’t have to work as hard.

This helps you make your website even more flexible with little effort and avoid downtime situations that could cost you money.

8. FREE SSL and DDoS protection

A CDN can provide additional protection. Since your traffic is routed via a CDN provider, they can protect you from DDoS attacks.

SSL is another advanced CDN protection feature. By allowing SSL, you ensure that all communication between the CDN servers and your hosting origin server is encrypted.

Overall, a CDN can keep a website stable by renewing TLS/SSL certificates, ensuring a high authentication, encryption, and honesty level.

9. Integration With Your Current Website

In most cases, CDNs can be set up on almost any platform. Solutions exist for a wide range of CMS, including WordPress and custom-built websites.