A Guide to CDNs

Intro

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers that work together in various geographic locations to ensure content is delivered much quicker to the local user.

It improves the user experience and ensures that a slow loading website isn’t going to be an issue for your customers. This keeps them happy, boosts conversions and improves SEO.

In this article, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at CDNs. We’ll explain what a CDN is, how they work and how they’ll benefit your company.

What is a CDN (Content Network Delivery?)

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CDNs are now an essential part of any website that wants to perform well. It’s highly likely that, whenever you load content from a website on your desktop or mobile device, you’re benefiting from a CDN.

In a nutshell, a CDN is a network of servers that are globally distributed. This allows them to provide:

• More availability
• Quicker performance
• Enhanced security

Essentially, CDNs bring content closer to where your site visitors are.

This is especially ideal if you know you’ve got a vastly distributed network of customers, with a high percentage living in, for example, America and another high percentage living in the UK.

To ensure your customers living in America and the UK benefit from the same high-speed performance, it helps to implement a CDN.

How Do CDNs Work?

The main reason we use CDNs is that they improve the efficiency of our website. They do this by storing cached versions of your content in numerous locations.

These locations are often referred to as PoPs (Points of Presence). A PoPs has multiple caching services that each take on the task of ensuring cached content is delivered to site visitors in their geographic location.

You can think of a Content Network Delivery as being like a hosting service (but more extended). It puts your content in numerous places all at the same time. This allows your site's visitors to experience fast-loading pages without the need for your hosting signals to basically ping across the entire globe.

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As you can imagine, CDNs consist of major swathes of servers that are working to provide content to your customers wherever they may be. Each server lives in multiple data centers that are all connected.

What are the Benefits of Using a CDN?

So, we’ve defined a CDN and shown you how they work. Now let’s take a look at why it might be useful to implement a CDN for your own website.

Enhanced Security

Another chief concern of many site visitors is security. In other words, can they trust your website not to be the victim of a data breach? Can they trust your website not to infect their computer with malware?

Malicious traffic exists, with bad bot traffic accounting for a quarter of all website traffic in 2020.

How does a CDN offer you enhanced security?

When you employ a CDN, bad traffic goes to your Content Network Delivery instead of your primary host. Because of this, sensitive data and information is kept out of reach.

More Website Uptime

Accessibility is for both you and your customers. It’s a performance driver, and it also leaves a customer satisfied. After all, when your website is down—and especially if it’s down fairly frequently—it harms your reputation.

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If you stick to just traditional hosting, you’ll still need to add more servers once your traffic starts to increase. At the same time, you’re still stuck with a single server. If there’s downtime, you suffer—and so do your customers.

A Content Network Delivery not only minimizes the amount of traffic, but also does it without interfering with your main host server. And because most of your content is cached, it can still show website visitors a partial view of your site in the event of downtime.

Improved Site Speed

70% of consumers have said that site speed is a dealbreaker for them when it comes to buying from online sellers. If a website takes too long to load, they won’t make a purchase.

What’s more, statistics have shown that 37% of site visitors bounce if a website takes 5 or more seconds to load.

Because a CDN can help you deal with data congestion and high volumes of traffic better, they can speed up your site’s performance so that page load time is within a satisfactory range. This is essential for eCommerce marketing if you’re to generate more leads and land more sales.

Not just this, but poor site speed negatively impacts your bounce rate. When this happens, your website could drop down the Google rankings.

Pro tip: Make sure your whole team is working together to ensure a better overall customer experience. Poor site speed affects your SEO but it’s not the only thing you need to take into consideration. Consider using a workload management tool to put together a solid SEO campaign.

Disadvantages of a CDN

All in all, a CDN improves the user experience by increasing site speed, ensuring more uptime and beefing up your security.

However, there are still one or two disadvantages you need to be aware of:

Not Cheap

How much a CDN will cost typically depends on what you need from it.

Naturally, a CDN is used by businesses that have high-traffic websites. To deal with all that traffic, a fairly high price is expected.

It’s important, then, to assess your situation. Do your needs necessitate a CDN? Are you a high-traffic website that would benefit from implementing a CDN?

If you think a CDN might be beyond your budget, you could consider startup loans to help with funding.

Server Location

Because CDNs are distributed throughout the world, it’s essential that the location of server A matches site visitor A. If it doesn’t, even a CDN isn’t going to help you.

Before you use a CDN, find out where your core audience is located, and place your CDN servers accordingly.

Hit and Miss Customer Support

Your customers know how important customer service is to them—and you know how important it is to you.

Because CDNs rely on 3rd party infrastructures, it might take a while to resolve an important issue.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a CDN

If you’ve decided that a CDN might be the right option for you, let’s take a look at the main factors you need to think about before purchasing one.

Your Needs

Just like all hosting services aren’t the same, neither are CDNs.

It’s important that you assess your needs in terms of traffic, budget, and the functions you need from a CDN before making your decision.

Speed

As we’ve seen, speed and efficiency is everything. If a CDN can’t deliver content to your site visitors quickly enough, it may not be worth the cost.

When measuring CDN speed, you can look at things like latency, response time and throughput.

Not just that, but the CDN needs to have a wide range of PoPS. This will allow it to deliver faster content wherever your customers are.

FAQ for CDNS

Are CDNs Safe?

Security is actually a major selling point when it comes to Content Network Delivery. When your data is transferred from one endpoint to another, it becomes encrypted.

What’s more, CDN’s mitigate DDoS.

In short, provided you always go with a reputable provider, CDNs are safe to use.

Do CDNS Work for Mobile Traffic?

Mobile traffic is now almost on par with desktop traffic, so it’s vitally important that your website looks quickly on mobile devices.

The good news is that, yes, CDNs are compatible with mobile devices.

How Is a CDN Able to Make My Website Load Faster?

CDNs increase your site speed load time by distributing and storing different content types, such as rich media files and images. They also reduce bandwidth and are able to deal with traffic spikes without harming your service.

Can I Not Just Use a Hosting Service?

Hosting services host your website. CDNs improve the performance of your website. They’re not the same as a hosting service.

You can stick with a hosting service if you prefer. But as we’ve seen, CDNs are designed to prevent downtime, increase website speed and boost content delivery.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully by now you understand what a CDN is, how it works, and how it would (and maybe would not) benefit your website.

We’ve also clarified a few questions related to CDNs and showed you which factors to take into consideration when buying one.

Make sure to always do your due diligence before you go ahead and purchase a CDN, and take the time to figure out your needs.

When you work with the right CDN, you’ll be able to improve not just the speed and performance of your website, but also user satisfaction. Trust between you and your customers will grow—and so will your conversions.