CDN – Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Users do not like slow websites. A slow website will result in bad user experience. It also affects the search engine rankings. A recent survey found that nearly half of the users expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

That’s why popular websites like Facebook and Google spends a lot of money to improve their website speed. Facebook and Google get millions of visitors per day still they load at the fastest speed to provide the best user experience. These websites load within 2 seconds.

Speed is an important factor to gain the best user experience. A fast website gains a huge amount of popularity in the world because of its enhanced user experience. Search engines improve the rankings of websites which provide the best user experience. So increasing the speed also increases the search engine rankings.

The increase in search engine rankings means the increase in the number of visitors to your website.

An increase in speed of a website can be achieved by using some techniques. But if your server is overloaded none of the techniques will work. The best solution for this is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Note: Content Delivery Network (CDN) is not a hosting provider like Bluehost. It is a service which pulls stored content from your server and delivers it quickly to your users.

What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

CDN is short for Content Delivery Network. A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers located in different parts of the world that deliver website content to users based on the geographic location of the user.

If you are not using a Content Delivery Network then your web host server has to deliver the content to different parts of the world. For example, if your hosting server is located at the United States and the user is from Australia then your server has to deliver the web content from the United States to Australia.

Likewise, your web hosting server delivers content to your users. Your hosting server delivers content from only one location that is from the United States. If the user is from the United States itself, the web content will be delivered very quickly. But if the user is from Australia then it takes some time to deliver content from the United States to Australia. This is due to the large distance between the United States and Australia. Also, if your website gets a large number of visitors, the website speed further decreases.

This problem can be easily solved by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) copies the static content of your website to its servers. So when a user visits your website, the static content is delivered from the CDN server which is closest to them.

For example, if your web host server is in the United States and the user is from Australia, the Content Delivery Network (CDN) server located at Australia delivers your website static content to the user. This results in an increase in your website speed. Thus, CDN increases your website speed.

Advantages of using Content Delivery Network (CDN)

• Increases website speed.
• Protects your website from DDoS attacks.
• Reduce bandwidth consumption of your original server.
• Handle high traffic loads.
• Block spammers and other bad bots.
• Reduces your website bounce rate.

Increases the number of page views to your website.