Marketing

What is a CDN & Why You Should Use One

August 15, 2017 by Andrew Woods

A CDN should be a part of every company’s website speed improvement strategy. If you’re not working to improve your website speed, you probably should be! Here’s why…

As far back as 2012, global web giants like Walmart started publishing reports on the immense power of improved speed, and more importantly, the immense cost of ignoring the issue. For example, take a look at Walmart’s giant drop in conversion rate as page load speed exceed just a few seconds, it speaks for itself!

What is a CDN?
February 2012
SRC: http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/28/4-awesome-slides-showing-how-page-speed-correlates-to-business-metrics-at-walmart-com/

What’s this mean? You’ll need to get your content to your visitor in a few seconds or less, or they’ll leave and find a faster alternative.

Not only that, site speed is one of many ranking factors on search engines like Google, so proving your ability to be fast on a wide range of devices will help your content get in front of new searchers, more frequently.

It’s time to take website speed seriously, and a CDN might be able to help you speed things up.

What Exactly is a CDN?

CDN stands for content delivery network, and is referring to a network of servers that deliver your content in the most geographically efficient way. To understand what a CDN is and the immense value it provides, it’s important to highlight it’s difference from a traditional server setup.

Traditional Server

A traditional server is one origin location that holds all of the files related to your website. When someone wants to visit your site, they “request” the files from the server, and the server “serves” them the requested files. With this setup, everyone connects to the same server, regardless of how near or far they are from it.

CDN

To speed things up, in comes the CDN. With a CDN, many of your website files get duplicated across multiple servers all over the world. When a website visitor in Baltimore requests website files, a server near Baltimore responds to the request. When a visitor near San Diego requests those same files, a server near San Diego responds to the request. As a result, the transfer of that information from server to website visitor happens much more quickly.

A CDN contributes to the speed and reliability of your website and can be a crucial tool in delivering a quality experience to your website visitors. Fast website, happy visitor.

Is Your Website Using a CDN?Let us speed things up a bit

Is Your Website Using a CDN?Let us speed things up a bit