What is a CDN & The Benefits Of Using One
We all get annoyed and frustrated when we visit a web page and it’s not loading as quick as we would like it too. As a business owner it’s even more frustrating. That one second delay can lead to a 7% drop in conversions, an 11% drop in page views and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction. A Content Delivery Network or CDN’s can help.
What is a CDN?
Without a CDN, any visitor no matter their physical location has to access the webpage from the origin server. The origin server is the primary source of your website’s data. As an example Netsonic’s datacenter is in Green Bay, Wisconsin. If you don’t have a CDN every visitor around the world has to request and get the webpage from Green Bay, Wisconsin. If someone lives in London, and is requesting and receiving a webpage that is from Green Bay, it’s going to take longer for the webpage to load.
Now when you use a CDN, the websites content is physical closer to the person requesting an receiving the data. CDN’s store a cached version of the websites content in multiple geographical locations. The multiple locations are strategically place around the world in points of presence or PoP’s. When that same user from London decides to pull up the webpage, the get the already cached version of the websites static content from a PoP in London. This reduces the amount of network hops, and the webpage get to the user faster.
Benefits of a CDN
Improved Speed & Latency
Distance is a contributing factor to latency. A CDN helps deliver static web resources faster. Websites that consist of static resources make up roughly 80% of the internet. Latency is the delay that occurs when a user requests a webpage and the moment when the webpage’s content appears. By using a CDN you are reducing latency.
Crash Resistance
Having a sudden influx of visitors to your site could make your server crash. The downtime your business experiences results in loosing customers and money. CDN’s help reduce the possibility of a server crash because that sudden influx of visitors isn’t being sent to only the origin server. Each visitor is being sent to the closest PoP to them. This reduces the load that the origin server experience helping your website experience less visitor influx crashes.
Improved User Experience
If you ever had the misfortune of experiencing a slow website you know how frustrating it is. This frustration can cost a business millions of dollars. If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year. CDN’s make it so your website is less likely to crash, and is faster. This improves your user experience. Your website visitors get their content quick, making them less frustrated. This increases your conversions.
Improves SEO
The end goal of SEO is to help potential visitors to your website find your website. Your hope is that you’ll get on the first page of any search engine. Anyone who has every dealt with SEO knows how overwhelming it can be at times. SEO has many different factor to make sure your website is ranking higher. Google officially stated that site speed is part of their ranking algorithm.
1 Second Does Matter
It doesn’t matter if you have a large multi million dollar corporation or are a small town blogger with big dreams. A CDN can help you accomplish your business goals, by increasing your websites speed. This increase of speed helps keep low latency, helps boost your rankings in Google and keeps your current and potential customers happy. A second really does matter. Having a 1 second delay on a webpage leads to 7% drop in conversions, an 11% drop in page views and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.
Netsonic offers CDN accelerator for your servers. Our CDN accelerator speeds up your server by 30-50%.
