The purpose of an authoritative website is to serve content all over the world. However, this comes with a predecided notion that the content should be displayed in less amount of time. If your website does not load within 3 seconds 53% of the user bounce off. Google has already established this fact.
Let’s talk about much-discussed CDN or better called a content delivery network in this article. Now, since I use WordPress we will talk extensively about WordPress CDN and how it affects the content distribution network.
Hosting providers give CDN for free these days. Content Delivery Network is a network of CDN cache servers that are placed in sync all over the world. These CDN cache servers are placed strategically to provide the users with website data in the least possible time.
This helps in reducing the website load time. This is irrespective of the physical location of the request. CDN routes the data request to the nearest possible data server from the site of origin. CDN is one of the finest technology in recent times for reliability, good performance & website speed.
Is a CDN the same as a web host?
There is a difference between these two. A web host is a server that hosts web pages. Similarly, CDN keeps the cached copies of the data on CDN cache servers. With the usage of CDN, the data load on the web hosting server is reduced many folds.
What are the benefits of using a CDN cache servers?
CDN provides a lot of benefits for websites with heavy traffic. Even for people using WordPress websites, CDN is fabulous. WordPress CDN makes the WP websites fast and also adds security to the existing structure. This helps in leveraging content distribution network within the website structure as well. If we were to list the benefits of the content distribution network, we would say below are the three important ones.
- Uptime: As a total load of requests gets distributed among many CDN servers, the main host server is devoid of the entire load resulting in better uptime.
- Speed: The prime task of CDN is to get data delivered to the client in the least possible time from the neared CDN edge server. This results in faster retrieval of data and better response time.
- Economical: Each request of data on the main server consumes data bandwidth inflating the charge to the customer. With CDN support, request gets distributed to various server saving a lot of money.
How does a content delivery network or CDN work?
Consider the above example. If we were in Iran and if we were looking up for some information which is hosted in a server located in France, it would take some time. However, If the website uses a content delivery network then the copies of information will be on the CDN cache servers. This will reduce the time to fetch the information considerably.
CDN cache servers are also referred to as Points of Presence or PoP. These are placed at different geographic locations. When information is requested from a browser or any other medium, CDN locates the source, finds the nearest available PoP, fetches the cached data and delivers to the client. This entire process is aimed towards faster delivery of content and lowering the bandwidth on the main server.
How does a WordPress CDN improve WP website load times?
For WordPress websites without the WordPress CDN service, there is only one point of data processing.
A web host that is situated at any single physical location. Irrespective of request origin, the data packets have to travel the entire path with the risk of packet loss.
With the implementation of WordPress CDN, the delivery path does not extend to the web host, rather CDN helps to deliver data from the nearest WordPress CDN server. Our blog site had this problem before we implemented CDN.
Our readers abroad in countries like the US and Australia complained about the website not loading quickly. Furthermore, when we checked this issue from other locations we found that this was actually true.
The next thing we did was, we got free CDN through Bluehost. Later on, when we switched to Sitegournd we got the WordPress CDN free with the hosting.
Reliability and Redundancy – How does a content distribution network keep a website always online?
The first task of CDN is to serve content to the user quickly. Most noteworthy from the nearest available cache server.
Hosting providers make this happen by placing multiple cached copies of websites on different CDN cache servers at different geographical locations.
So the data on the website is at multiple locations and is always live of different servers. This process removes and redundancy for sure and is also reliable.
Data Security – How does a content delivery network protect data?
In the case of CDN-enabled routes, traffic is never fulfilled by the web server, rather the load is distributed among many CDN servers.
This helps in filtering out the DDoS attacks on the server. These nodes are in compliance with TLS and SSL certificates and make sure about the encryption of traffic.
Apart from these, CDN also features secure tokens and hotlink protection for an added layer of security.
How does a content delivery network reduce bandwidth costs?
Whenever a request is made to a web server, bandwidth is consumed. If CDN is in play in between, it eliminates many initial investments and other maintenance charges.
As all the information is fetched from CDN servers, the bandwidth of the webserver isn’t consumed to that large extent saving a lot of money. One is also saved from upgrading to a bigger and expensive hosting plan when the site traffic increases in due course.
Our site uses CDN for serving content and we have seen a tremendous amount of speed gain over time. Furthermore, CDN also helped us to add more security to our blog. We would recommend using SiteGround as you get free CDN along with the hosting.
Furthermore, do check out Wildcard SSL as it allows you to secure unlimited domains for a very nominal price.
If you have any questions please leave them in the comment section below.
