What is a CDN?

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A Content Delivery Network is a distribution of servers that stores your website content & allows it to be served to users much more quickly.

You’ve probably heard CDN echoed through countless calls and meetings, yet may never have given it a second thought. But if your website serves customers from many different regions of the country or the world, not having one implemented could be slowing your site down enough that it could be costing you traffic and clients daily.

Benefits of Using a Content Delivery Network

Let’s explore exactly what a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is and how it can help your business:

let’s say that you run a business that relies on the internet to sell your product, either nationally or internationally.

Content Delivery Network

You may notice that even after spending a ton of money on your digital marketing campaign, visitors are either leaving midway through their visit, or right before the purchase.

Of course, there are several variables to this, but one in particular that can play a large role could be the fact that your website may not currently be on a Content Delivery Network.

Customers these days can be quite impatient. Load times can affect how long your customers will wait for your website to load.

website loading
Research shows that 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Did you know?

A two-second delay can lead to more than 4% loss in satisfaction! Furthermore, this delay can lead to an average of 4.3% loss in revenue per visitor.

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Fact:

Without a CDN, the farther a visitor is from where your website is hosted, the longer it takes for data to reach them. This can make the page load speeds unbearable for users from around the world which can dramatically lower the site’s ability to capture the trust and business of customers finding your site from various search engines.

Fast CDN
A Content Delivery Network can improve your website load time, reduce bandwidth costs, handle more traffic, and in addition to having a Secure Socket Layer – can improve security.

On a CDN (Content Delivery Network), a group of servers, are geographically spread out and work together to load your website as quickly as possible.

Keep in mind, that you being on a CDN does not actually host your website, nor does it replace hosting of your website. What it does is cache your content and subsequently improve your website speed and overall performance.

How does a CDN actually work?

A Content Delivery Network, or sometimes called a Content Distribution Network, is a tight-knit group of individual servers that are connected together across the globe.

Think of it as spreading a bunch of dots across a map and drawing lines from one dot to another.

Pretty simple, right?

The CDN’s primary goal is to deliver respective content and images in the least amount of time, which will ultimately reduce loading times.

It does this in a way that is inexpensive, efficient, and most importantly, secure.

What a CDN essentially does is place specific servers at the exact exchange spots between various networks. These networks are called IXPs, and are the general locations where Internet Providers come together to give each other the rights to traffic on each other’s networks.

A CDN Allows Users From Around the World to Quickly Access Your Site

Pretty awesome, right?

And even better, your customers no longer have to connect to your website’s origin server. With a well-distributed Content Delivery Network, your users can access the website from the closest data center to them which can drastically speed up load times for users that are located the furthest away from where the site is originally hosted.

If you are not on a CDN Network, contact a representative from CaliNetworks. We can help you speed up your site response, and ultimately, decrease the business that you may be losing because of slow site speed. Give us a call at 1-805-409-7700 or fill out our contact form to get in touch with an experienced SEO analyst or web developer today.

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