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.
