What Is CDN? How Does A CDN Work? What Are The Benefits Of CDN?
What Is CDN: It is now a known fact that the speed with which a site loads, that is the load time of a site, is a crucial ranking factor. The slower a site loads, the lower its rankings get.
This is because visitors get annoyed when a page takes a lot of time to load. When there are thousands of other options, why would they wait for your site to load? They can just go back to the search results page and visit another site. And that’s what they do.
In fact, 47 per cent of users expect a page to load within 2 seconds. That’s almost half of the users you are likely to lose if your website loads slowly. So, it is very important to reduce the load time of your website. If you are serious about blogging, this should be one of your topmost priorities – to do anything and everything in your control to improve the load time of your site.
While there are many ways to improve load time, one thing that you must be doing, especially, if you are catering to a global audience is use a Content Delivery Network or CDN. Now, what is CDN and what are the benefits of CDN?
This is what this article is about. Read on to find out.
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What Is CDN Or Content Delivery Network?
Before we get into what is a CDN, we must know how websites work.
For a website to exist, with all its content and files, someone should host it. This is what web hosting service providers do. Like Blogsperia is hosted with Hostinger. Blogsperia, like most of the others, is using shared hosting. Now, what exactly is web hosting? What do the service providers do?
Web hosting service providers store the content and files of your site in data centers. When a user logs on to blgxpria.com, a request is sent to the data center of Hostinger. Then the files and content of Blogsperia load onto the browser of the user.
Now, this, as you can imagine, is a complex process, especially, if the data center is located far away from the user. For example, Blogsperia uses a data center in the US. Now, for a user who is surfing from another part of the world, say India, the site will take a lot more time to load than for someone who is in the US.
The user in India, may, in the meanwhile, get pissed off with the speed with the site is loading and hence, hit the ‘back’ button. We don’t want that. This could be disastrous for any business organization, e-commerce site, like Amazon, and even for bloggers like us.
So, what do we do?
One way address this problem is to use a CDN.
What Is CDN?
A CDN or Content delivery Network is a network of data centers spread across the world, in various geographic locations. Each of these data centers are called Point of Presence or POP. What a CDN basically does is that it replicates the content and stores them in various data centers in various geographical location.
When a user logs on to a particular site using CDN, the request is sent to the data center that is geographically located nearer to that user. This CDN data center is called Edge Server’. As a result, the load time gets reduced for that particular user.
What Are The Benefits Of CDN?
The survival of any website and the related business depend on how good user experience it provides. Using a CDN is of utmost importance for business organizations who are planning to expand and have a global presence. Not only existing users will be happy and satisfied because of the high speed with which the website loads, but also new users will come.
Using CDN can be beneficial in the following ways:
- As explained above, site speed or load time is a ranking factor. The use of CDN will increase the site speed and hence, improve ranking.
- Users will be happy with your site.
- Bounce rate due to high load time will reduce.
- Your site will be able to deal with higher traffic. And the traffic will increase. But the chances of your site crashing will be less.
- Using CDN will help in reducing your cost. It is comparatively cheaper than web hosting.
- Since there will be multiple servers or data centers, if the nearest server is not working, the request will be sent to the next nearest server. And users will still be able to visit your site.
Check Out The Best Free CDN Providers Here
So, you can see why you should be using a CDN. There are many CDN service providers, both paid and free. Some of them are:
I hope I have been able to explain what is CDN and the benefits of using CDN. If you have any question regarding what is Content Delivery Network, ask them below and I will get back to you as soon as possible.