Table of Contents
What is a CDN and how does it work?
Advantages of using a CDN to improve loading speed
Disadvantages of a CDN
Conclusion
The loading speed of our website is becoming more important every day , as Google penalizes slow web pages. In addition, we have little time in a world based on micro-moments and little patience when searching on the Internet, as we want to find what we are looking for quickly.
To improve the loading speed of our website, it is important that the page is well programmed technically, have a cache system, optimized images, a good server, specify the browser cache, minimize and optimize scripts.
A very powerful tool to measure the loading general manager email lists speed and detect elements to improve on the page is gtmetrix.com, on this page we can measure the loading time and the different elements of the page, detailing each one of them to help us in its optimization.
Once the page is well optimized, a very interesting and increasingly used option is to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
What is a CDN and how does it work?
It is a Content Delivery Network. In other words, our website is hosted on a server in a specific physical location and a CDN is a network of servers distributed around the world that make a copy of your website and then show it to users located within that geographic radius. Since the data centers are strategically located around the world, they improve the download speed of our website for that specific user.
Users make requests for the page directly to the network servers, improving the bandwidth of the main server. The website is cached, therefore, fewer requests are made to the database, which means that the server does not have as much demand for information.
The goal is for the user to receive information from the server closest to their geographic location and thus maximize the bandwidth of the server where the website is hosted (reducing the load). In this way, an improvement in the speed of our website will be noticed and we will reduce server costs.
At an international level, the speed at which users from different locations view the website is substantially improved, avoiding transatlantic connections and consequently improving the user experience.
The servers store the cached web page and modify it from time to time to keep the information up to date.
Your website will always be visible, if your hosting goes down, the CDN will continue to work.
Improves the security of your website by blocking potential attacks.
There are many CDN companies that offer free packages like Cloudflare and paid packages like Amazon, MaxCDN, Akamai. Hosting companies are also offering CDNs along with their hosting services.
Advantages of using a CDN to improve loading speed
Your website will be ready to be downloaded from a more immediate location since it will be available on servers strategically located around the world.
The main server where your website is hosted will have less load, so you will save on resources necessary for the proper functioning of your website.
Your data will be better protected from possible attacks.
Recommended for websites with many simultaneous visits.
Disadvantages of a CDN
Your information will not be up-to-date at the moment , as it takes time to update and replicate across all the servers in the CDN network, so on developing websites, which are constantly being maintained and have content updated, this may cause problems. If you need your website to be updated at the moment, you must take into account the configuration of our CDN and this could create incidents.
Conclusion
Before hiring a CDN, it is very important to have an international business plan and to ensure that the website is well optimized, as we mentioned at the beginning of the article.
Once you have your website perfectly optimized, you can decide whether to install a CDN and whether it is really necessary on your website. It is highly recommended, especially for pages with worldwide traffic and pages with a lot of simultaneous user traffic.
