As a visitor, how long do you wait for a website to load?
Certainly, not more than 2 seconds for a website to pop up!
The site’s speed has a purely psychological phenomenon. It can attract or deter visitors by making a strong first impression and by enhancing the user experiences, search rankings, even sales and conversions. If your website loads faster instantly, you would be able to make your first impression healthy.
Google Panda is an algorithmic tool developed to weed out poor quality sites and rank them at a lower level in search engines. The page speed is a major factor which can help you to gain high ranking in search engine.
After knowing this fact, the most contentious and glaring question which comes to your mind would be, ‘how to increase site speed?’ On a small scale, my humble advice for this is to minimise on-page components, optimise visuals, and the most productive part of the process is to compress large pages. However, in the case of large websites, particularly the e-commerce sites and high-value user experiences, the most effective and highly efficient solution with substantially and proven results is the Content Delivery Network.
What is Content Delivery Network?
In the internet community, the trend of Content Delivery Network utilisation to provide data across the nodes in the most efficient possible way is increasing day by day. CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network of servers which deliver content to user from website. Each server in this network is known as “Edge Server” or “Edge Node”. All these nodes together form the edge network with an addition of bandwidth or servers. CDN finds the most optimal edge node when a user request for content from your site. It automatically connects to the server which is closest to the client. This automatic selection is not only based on the proximity of the requesting client to the server, but it also checks the highest available capacity and the cost.
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One thing that should be clarified about Content Delivery Network is that it is something which you can use on the top of web hosting account because it can speed up things. CDN can help you to improve your hosting to increase traffic and speed. It is secure and reliable, but it does not replace the web hosting account. CDN sounds like the scary and super complicated subject, but honestly, it is the best and a straight forward option!
What can a CDN add to your site?
Speed
Speed is the most obvious advantage of CDN. It makes site load quickly. The possible reason behind speed is that CDN companies are running a massive network of servers all over the world. This system allows the users to access the website from closest server to them. Distributed data centres and caching reduce the network latency. If you are the host of a lot of content, then the cheapest CDN can dramatically reduce the loading time of your site.
Resource Caching
Speeding up the website is critical. You are not required to focus on the ranking, but you also have to keep the bottom line profits as high as possible. Caching is a big part of the bandwidth and server resource conservation. You can increase site speed with caching. The good news is that even a cheapest CDN provider knows every aspect of caching.
Protection against Traffic Spikes
CDNs share high traffic among multiple servers and make the site able to handle site surges and spikes. A CDN increases network backbone capacity, which means that you are capable enough to control the influx of traffic. CDNs running an extensive network of servers have scalable and reliable sources. These resources are always available for you even in the worst case scenario when you have a huge amount of traffic but unable to handle it.
Final Verdict
In the online jungle where bewildering complexity or brutal competitiveness is increasing, web hosting is something which is incredibly inexpensive and capable of making people satisfied by just purchasing a hosting plan. When your website grows and starts generating more and more traffic, then you have to start thinking about the content delivery network. A CDN improves UX/UI with faster speed and concurrent resource downloads. Even the cheapest CDN can accommodate diverse audiences including the users outside the central server. Last, but not the least, CDN increases security and reliability by decreasing the site traffic during traffic surges.
Article provided by Mike Miller, marketing manager of spacecdn