What is a CDN and its benefits?

A Content Delivery Network (otherwise called Content Distribution Network) stores your website’s assets (like images and video) in multiple servers across the world. The advantages are:

A faster, more efficient, and more reliable way to get your website’s content to the people accessing it from their browsers around the world. In other words, better customer experience.

Since modern online users are impatient (it’s been proven that even a 4 second delay in accessing a site causes people to click away), a faster website also boosts brand trust and sales.

CDNs protect your website from modern cyber threats that older security methods such as traditional Firewalls can’t cope with, like DDoS attacks and SQL injection.

With a CDN installed, you get real-time analytics providing deeper levels of insight on your website traffic.

Because your website assets are spread out across the world, you need less bandwidth from your core hosting supplier, which lowers the costs. Most CDNs also automatically minimize the file sizes of common website assets like HTML and text, further saving on bandwidth.

Why is CDN used?

Content Delivery Networks are becoming a modern website necessity, for these four main reasons:

Faster website speed, with no latency (delays).

Good customer experience which amounts to brand trust and more sales.

In-depth protection against the most dangerous modern cyber threats.

Lowered bandwidth, so less hosting costs.

What is a CDN PoP?

A Point of Presence (PoP) is the geographical location of a CDN edge server, which contains cached (stored) content from your website. Quality CDNs have numerous POP edge servers, distributed effectively around the world to serve a global audience.

Do I really need a CDN?

If the success of your business, like most these days, depends on quality content and a global audience, a CDN is basically a necessity for the online experience that modern customers expect.

Research by Google shows that 53% of your website visitors are likely to click away if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. That’s a huge loss in sales conversions for any business.

If your website is purely a text brochure and mostly used by people in the same country that you host your website in, you could be ok without a CDN. Just be sure that you don’t have large images on your site that slow down load time. Google’s research also reveals that one out of two people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds.