If you’ve been working on your website lately, you’ve likely heard the term “CDN” and how it can help your site. So, what is a CDN, and is a CDN worth it?
What is a CDN?
Well, in short, a CDN (content delivery network) makes your website faster.
Yep, that’s a pretty simple explanation, but the entire reason for a CDN is to make sure that the files your website needs to run are accessed instantly and downloaded quickly!
A CDN is a network of servers that store your website’s static content (think images, videos, PDFs, even Javascript and CSS files), and then will deliver that content from the geographically closest server on the network. CDNs are also optimized to store static content, so there’s no overhead for processing web scripting languages like PHP, or worrying about form data, or passing through SEO data. Everything is optimized for speed and efficiency!
CDNs are also small insurance policies against traffic spikes that might occur for your website. If your site has a blog post that suddenly goes viral, a CDN will help mitigate the heavy lead your site might be experiencing, by off-loading all those static requests to servers all over the world, delivering them to your visitors as quickly as possible.
Does your website need a CDN?
While it’s not required, it’s a good idea to do everything you can to speed up the delivery of your webpages to your visitors. Research has indicated you can lose a visitor’s attention in as little as 8 seconds! The faster your webpage loads, the quicker it responds to every request from your visitors, the greater your website’s retention rate (or put into SEO terms way, your bounce rate will drop). Not to mention search engines give higher placement to site’s that respond and load quickly.
The additional security a CDN provides is another factor to take into consideration. By handling a large portion of your website’s files, things like DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are far less effective. Your CDN will simply look at those harmful requests, and handle them without adversely affecting your site’s response time.
Is a CDN Worth it?
Yes. It is. Anything that can make your website faster is important! If your current website provider doesn’t offer a CDN, you may want to look at moving your hosting. There are also third party options like WP Rocket for WordPress that allow you to integrate into their CDN with your current.
If you have any questions about how to improve your website with a CDN, contact us today! If you want a more thorough look at what you can do to improve your website, go ahead and request a Free Website Review!