If you find yourself in need of more information about a CDN, make sure you do not miss this content delivery network definition article. Throughout the article, you will also learn why your WordPress website needs one.
To make everyone’s lives easier, we made sure to make the explanation as simple and straightforward as possible. Because who really needs all those fancy words in life after all? Unless you truly want to go in-depth, possibly the scientific route, you most certainly like the flow of a lightly written text.
That said, are you interested in learning more about what a CDN is and why exactly your WordPress website needs one, read along and let’s have some fun.
Thus far, you’re already familiar with the fact that CDN is short for content delivery network. To make a long story short, with a CDN, your website’s content gets delivered fast to the end user regardless of their geolocation. But why does this even matter? If you do not want your page to load as fast as possible, you can stop reading now. However, if you are all about enhancing your page load and delivering the best user experience, continue reading.
What Can a CDN Do to Improve Your Website?
A CDN is a network of servers which are spread around the globe. The distribution of your website’s content to your visitors is situated in their geographical location. Instead of a server from an entirely different location doing the work, the one closest to the visitors takes care of the content delivery. This can drastically reduce the server response time, meaning your website will load faster. Hurray for site speed.
Not only will your guests become regular visitors, they will be less likely to leave it early if you take care of the speed. More and more brands are choosing content delivery networks to ensure a flawless experience. Especially if they are dealing with videos, streaming audio, and even e-commerce.
Without a CDN, the source server spreads website’s content around the globe. Meanwhile, a page which uses a content delivery network triggers its servers on a geographical basis. Meaning, if someone is browsing from Valencia, Spain, the server which is located in Valencia or closest to it will distribute your website’s content.
Of course, all this comes with an additional fee but depending on the level of business you are at, you might need to consider it. Or in other words, if your website is generating a large amount of traffic you quite possibly need a CDN. But the first approach of succeeding at guaranteeing fantastic user experience is by using a VPS. On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of other things you can do to optimize your website for great UX.
WordPress websites can benefit from a CDN tremendously, but let’s investigate it further to get an even better understanding of why you need this piece of technology.
Speed
With the mobile-first web, speed is unquestionably the number one thing you should have optimized to a T for your WP website. No one likes slow loading pages and waiting endless amount of time for a full page to fully load.
In the modern age we are living, time matters. We expect that the whole web to work lightning fast. And then, when we are hunting down a piece of particular content, the website we land on keeps showing us a white screen with zero content loading. What do we do? We leave. Is this good for the webmaster? No. Do you want your website to be like the scenario above? No.
Luckily, a CDN is an easy solution to help mitigate this concern and speed up your website globally.
SEO
If you are doing SEO optimization for your website, you know it is not just keywords and link building anymore. One of the most important factors of SEO in this day and age is the overall quality of your website. If Google sees that people find your website beneficial it is very likely it will rank it higher. Even if the competition has more backlinks than you.
With great site speed and outstanding content, user experience will improve. They will click around rather than leave it within seconds of visiting. Google and all other search engines absolutely love speed. It helps uncle G with crawling and indexing your pages. Which happens much faster.
User Experience
Did I already mention that people, especially mobile users, have the biggest need for speed? If it does not load in a snap, boy, you are leaving a ton of money on the table. Every website owner wants to hook his or her visitors and keep them for as long as possible. By using a CDN, it can be almost predictable that the UX of your website will increase. Your WordPress website’s bounce rate will likely drop and you’ll experience more page views. This means two things. Happy users and happy search engines. I should add another one. Happy webmaster.
Always Live
You never know, you might post an article that gets shared on Reddit which can cause an immense spike in traffic. In case your web host isn’t ready for the sudden influx of traffic, your website could crash. Just imagine how many lost emails, customers, etc that would mean! By using a content delivery network, your site is much better equipped to stay live 24/7/365. Instead of one single server taking care of it, a CDN distributes your website’s load across many servers and employs redundancy incase one server goes offline.
Protection
Immediately after you decide to start using a CDN for your WordPress website, it becomes safer and more secure. The bigger it gets, the higher the chance you will start experiencing different attacks. There is no need for you to undergo any and you should be constantly protected. Hackers and malicious bots are everywhere. They are always on the quest to find websites in which protection is not first-class. If you feel like you need to do something about the security of your website, think about using a content delivery network that provides DDoS protection and other security measures. Meanwhile, there are many other ways to secure your WordPress site against hackers.
So, did this convince you to finally integrate a CDN with your website? As an icing on a cake, you should know that using one is way simpler than you think. In addition, there are rarely any disadvantages of using a content delivery network with your page. There is one more thing that you should be aware of before picking the ideal provider for your rapidly growing page. Before doing anything else, check the global coverage of the CDN. This is important because you’ll want the CDN provider to have a presence in the area which your visitors are coming from.
There you have it. Now you know why your WordPress website needs a CDN.
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