What Is a CDN & Why You Should Use One


Content Delivery Network or CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and as its name suggests, it is meant to deliver the content using the network to your users and visitors, so it acts as a mediator between your clients or customers and your business.

A content delivery network is system of computers which are interconnected and allows the users or visitors to access the website very frequently by offering the content of web or internet to them through duplicating the parts of the website or as a whole on more than one server.

Mostly content such as video, images, audio, text etc. are hosted by CDN and this it do by storing more than one copy of the web content on servers across the world. More no. of CDN servers; more is good for the users as content is very closer stored for them.

Benefits of Using a CDN

If CDN has more servers it proves very efficient and effective and thus offers several benefits, as follow:

  • Reliable delivery of the content
  • Offer optimal protection from the traffic surges, web hackers and prevent shortage of internet
  • Prompt and reliable web browsing experience
  • SEO ranks higher
  • Great customer satisfaction
  • Large no. of customers, visitors, sales and leads
  • Increased rate of conversion
  • Reducing down times

Customer Satisfaction & Conversion Rates

Customer satisfaction is the main goal of every organization and thus to satisfy them, the speed of browsing your website must be excellent and quite high. People judge your products and services performance as they found the performance of your website i.e. the quality of the content and most important is its speed. So, one must focus on increasing the browsing speed as it convert the visitors in leads, leads turn in customers, customers convert into sales and finally sales in to profit.

Now as to allow your users to gain good and prompt browsing web experience, two steps can be taken;

  • Implement best practices for enhancing web performance
  • CDN must be integrated with your website

It helps in optimizing the code of your website, size of payload, browser rendering and make it more user and mobile friendly.

This can be complemented by CDN along with optimizing load times, by reducing DNS lookups and by maximizing bandwidth and others.

SEO Rankings

Search engine optimization is a method by which websites becomes accessible on priority basis to the visitors searching the site or related content by typing it in the search engine. If your website has more value, it becomes visible on the top of the search engine results.

If someone wants to know the value of their website, page speed is considered as one of the main factor in determining this. And we all know that both Google and Bing give preference to the optimized websites.
If you sign up for CDN, you can be sure that your website will not go behind.

How do they do it? – Content Delivery Networks

When your website gets integrated with a CDN, you need to choose which content you want to copy to those servers as CDN is having large number of servers.

Almost all the static files such as images, audios, videos, PDF, Java script, CSS etc. are host by CDN andas the content is updated very frequently so it remains on the server. Now, this splitting of the data reduces the load on the hosting server, saves the bandwidth and also save some money by enabling reloading time faster.

If you wish to check the speed of your website from various locations, various online tools are available and among them,two which are frequently used are here:

  • Pingdom Tool
  • WebPage Test

Web browsers such as Google chrome and internet explorer are used by these tests. They also offer some good suggestions by which website performance can be enhanced.

To establish good and long term connections between your customers and your business, static content is distributed using CDN as it ensures prompt load times. CDN is very powerful and their power lies in their interconnectivity and servers which are always near to the visitors.

CDN ensures fast loading times, thereby decrease bounce rates, increase the rate of conversionand offer a good and enjoyable browsing experience to the people.

It is quite easy to setup a CDN without considering the platform you’re using. It will take only few minutes to complete the process of sign up and to configure.

Why You Should Use a CDN

As we all know, browsing speed of the page has some major effects on the:

  • Rate of Conversion
  • SEO rankings
  • Quality of the Website
  • User experience

Good and prompt web browsing is essential for a good website as it affects its visitor’s later customers to a great extent. If the speed of browsing your website is fast, google and other search engines display your site on priority basis in the search engine results. And to offer good browsing experience to the users is must as it attract large no. of people.

Content Delivery Network or CDN


What is CDN and why you should use one?

When you have a website and you want to improve the user experience by providing high availability and high performance, then you have to go ahead and start using Content Delivery Network or CDN. Your business website is meant to perform well everywhere in the world and to ensure that and to redefine its performance level, CDNs will do a great job.

First let us understand what it really is? CDNs are a system where a large number of servers which might be located at different strategic locations around the globe, are connected to each other. All these servers are capable to provide the content of your website to the potential user. So when a customer clicks on your website he is served with the contents of your website from one of the multiple servers which have your website on them. This particular server will be the one which is geographically located nearest to the visitor. When a visitor receives your website content from a server near him instead of a server located may be half way across the globe, his experience will definitely be better. In order to make maximum visitors’ experience a good one, it will be recommended to have as many servers as possible in the CDN, the more the merrier!

Advantages of using Content Delivery Networks

When you use CDN your reliability increases. Your website becomes less susceptible to hanging because of heavy traffic on a server. Also it becomes difficult for those who are there to harm your website by hacking it. It is simple, when someone needs to have a look at your website, he gets to do so by the server nearest to him. This is quick, reliable and clean. Some other inherent benefits would be:

  • Your ranking in search engine results gets a boost
  • the load on your hosting is reduced
  • Your customers are happy!
  • Minimized possibility of a downtime

Improved SEO Rankings

When search engines like Google assign a rank to a website, they take a number of criterions in consideration. One of these criterion is the speed at which the web pages of your website load. When there is a web site which has very high speed of loading its web pages, it gets a plus point and its ranking improves on the result page. If you use CDN for your web site it is sure to boost the web page loading speed and your web site will be loaded in minimum time. That gets you improved ranking in search results. Definitely when a website appears in the first few pages of the search results of any search engine, it will get more visitors and hence more business.

Customer Satisfaction

Remember that frustration that creeps in when the plate has been set in front of you on the dining table but the food is taking ages in coming. It is same feeling that a visitor gets when he clicks on the website and the content takes forever to get loaded. It simply drives them away to other faster loading websites. It is extremely essential to keep the website loading speed very high if you want to retain visitors and satisfy them. Using CDN will ensure that your visitor feels happy clicking your website name.

Less load on Hosting

There is a possibility that at a given time there are a number of visitors who want to check out your website. This leads to a high surge of traffic, which might be problematic for your hosting and it might not be able to serve your website quickly to everybody. But if you are using CDN this problem is resolved and all the content of your website reaches the visitor quickly, including audio and video files too.

These benefits clearly show that by using CDN you ensure that the visitors that come clicking, are happy and get converted into customers and do come back for more business. Also you get the benefit of publicity by word of mouth. The quality of surfing experience of the visitor on your website improves as does your SEO ranking. CDNs are definitely meant to do a lot of good!