A content delivery network or CDN is a group of servers around the world that serve web pages. Rather than having visitors request pages from your single webserver, a CDN distributes cached pages of your website on servers around the globe. If your website's hosting server is located in Dallas, TX, it could take several seconds to reach someone in Europe. With a CDN solution, the visitor could access a cached copy of the website on a server located in Europe. This would cut down the "content delivery" time by several seconds. Now that you understand the basics, we will explain how a content delivery network improves website performance.
Overall Speed Increase
As we have explained, content delivery networks decrease the distance between the user and nearest server. Therefore, the latency of page loading will drastically reduce when accessed from servers in a similar geographic location. The network ensures that your webpages are available globally at similar speeds regardless of a visitor's location. The best CDN providers have servers located on every continent so that almost everyone is covered around the world. Moreover, some CDNs have multiple servers per country too. In order to gain an overall increase in speed and performance, your website can implement a CDN network to server its content.
Increasing Your Points of Presence
When you install a CDN with your website, you will increase the number of access points for your content. Since content delivery networks have servers around the globe, your website content is stored on each of these servers. This improves the accessibility of your website in many different locations without having to buy additional servers. You can simply use the infrastructure of the CDN provider to serve cached content to the visitors in that region. Of course, it's much cheaper to utilize existing infrastructure rather than building your own from scratch.
Improve User Conversion Rates
A CDN allows websites to improve their conversion rates for sales, leads or engagement. One of the primary goals of a website is to maximize user conversions. If you have long load times, visitors will not wait for the wordpress website to load very long. Other major companies have found that every drop in 1 second of load time lead to a significant increase in conversions. If you want your website to perform better in terms of user metrics, engagement and goal completion, a CDN could give your platform the boost to improve conversion rates overall.
Saving Server Resources
Moreover, distributing cached copies of content on other servers reduces the load on your primary server. Since webpages would be served from other points of presence, the bandwidth usage and required resources for your hosting account will decrease. This saves you plenty of resources on your primary hosting environment. If you are using a CDN with wordpress, all of the media images, cached pages and CSS files can be cached on other servers. This gives your hosting server more resources to work with. As a result, you won't run over bandwidth limits or have to upgrade your hosting package as quickly.
Protecting Your Website From DDoS Attacks
Content delivery networks offer protection against DDoS attacks so that your website can keep performing. Typically, it is much easier for a website to suffer from a DDoS attack if all the content is being served from one server. However, a CDN serves the content from a number of servers. Thus, hackers or cybercriminals would have to create attacks on a number of servers rather than just one IP address. Combined with the advanced techniques that CDN platforms have to identify and prevent DDoS attacks, your website can perform better with load balancing and reliable uptime even during an attack.
Content delivery networks are a great platform to increase your overall website performance. By lowering the distance between users and content, the overall speed of the website improves. It increases your overall website presence around the globe, adding multiple points of presence to many different locations. With the increase in speed and accessibility, visitors are more likely to take actions which will improve conversion rates. Moreover a content delivery network can save on valuable server resources, reducing the amount of bandwidth and network capacity used by a website. On top of that, they offer protection against DDoS attacks, keeping your website live during tough times. These are the primary ways that a CDN can improve your overall website performance from page speed to goal conversions.
