By Are you wondering what a content delivery network is and how it can help your WordPress website grow and help you succeed?
When you start running your own website, there are a lot of essential things you’ll need to consider.
For instance, what kind of content are you going to produce to inform and entertain your target audience? How can you make sure that you’re ranking high in the search engine result pages? What will you need to do to outshine your competition?
While all of these questions are crucial, there’s one more major issue that you’ll need to address before you can begin making money online, and that’s how you can make sure your site loads quickly.
Site loading speed is one of the biggest factors in online success today, and there are plenty of easy ways to improve it, including investing in the right content delivery network.
Today, we’re going to explore how a WordPress CDN can transform your site performance and help you to decide whether you need your own CDN services.
What is a Content Delivery Network?
Before you searching for the best CDN for WordPress, you’re going to need to understand what a content delivery network actually is.
In a typical web hosting space, all of the traffic that runs to your website is directed straight to your host’s web server, the one that was installed on your website.
Unfortunately, your host’s web server is limited, which means that the more data you send its way, the slower your website becomes for your visitors.
A content delivery network, however, is a global team of servers that work together to deliver content to site visitors on your website, based on where they’re located in the world.
A slow website leads to enormous problems for your company, particularly now that page speed is an SEO ranking factor.
Additionally, 47% of customers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, meaning that if you don’t perform quickly, you could lose your visitors.
So, how does a WordPress CDN work to speed up your site?
How Does a WordPress CDN Work?
Before you start exploring your options for CDN services, you’ll need to know how this technology is going to work to make your website run faster. After all, you don’t want to be paying for something that you don’t fully understand.
To start using a content delivery network, you’ll need to choose a provider and subscribe to their service, such as Cloudflare CDN. In exchange for a monthly fee (or sometimes for free!), the CDN provider will allow you to use their data network, usually through a plugin like WP Rocket, or CDN Enabler. There shouldn’t be any work required to get things going on your part, that’s what your CDN provider is for.
With your WordPress CDN installed, whenever someone visits your website, the content on your pages will load from the content network that’s closest to your customer. That means that the data can get to them much faster than it would if your site was stored in a single data center, as seen below with Cloudflare.
Most CDN services use a combination of technologies to route information from the right location – including geolocation routing and IP anycast. What’s more, the solution can detect precisely where user requests are coming from, so those requests will always be routed to the nearest POP (Point of Presence).
While you’ll still need to choose a strategic location for your WordPress host server, CDN makes it much easier to keep everything running quickly and smoothly.
What are the Benefits of CDN Services?
Now that you know what a WordPress CDN does, you’re probably wondering what the main benefits of investing in one are.
Well, if you’re constantly tracking down new ways to speed up your website, the most apparent benefit is a significant performance boost. A faster loading site directly correlates with higher conversion rates, and it means that you can provide a better user experience to your visitors and customers too.
And remember, a 1-second decrease in load speed can lead to an up to 7% reduction in conversions.
What’s more, Google DoubleClick claims that 53% of visits to mobile sites are abandoned after 3 seconds of loading time.
Some of the other major benefits of the best CDN for WordPress include:
- Lower Bandwidth Costs: With a CDN, you can offload resources and CPU traffic from your hosting server. This reduces traffic spikes and stops them from overwhelming your host. It also lowers your bandwidth costs. The last thing you want is a huge bill for increased site traffic. A good CDN will also prevent your site from crashing.
- Higher Availability and Scalability: The right CDN services give you higher levels of scalability and availability. Since replicated content from your website will be available across multiple points of presence and in different geographic locations, web traffic can be automatically routed to a different server if the first one goes down.
- SEO Advantages: If you want to show up on page one of Google, you’re going to need a quick website. Ultimately, a fast site will improve the experience of search engine crawling bots and your customers. And a CDN can help.
- Improved Security: Many CDN providers offer extra protection such as web application firewalls and origin shields. These solutions assist in mitigating DDoS attacks for your WordPress site. Other benefits include putting you behind a proxy, which hides your origin IP address and gives you more security.
Do You Need a Content Delivery Network?
So, should you be investing in a content delivery network for your website?
Well, it depends on the kind of online presence that you want to create. For instance, if you have a traffic-heavy website already, with people from all over the world visiting your site, then there’s a good chance you’re going to need a CDN.
- You expect your business to multiply
- Your site has lots of webpages
- You have a global audience
Before you choose your content delivery network, just make sure to do your research. To start, find out where the company’s points of presence are. This will ensure that you’re providing a better experience in the areas where you have the most visitors or customers. It’s also a good idea to look into the kind of customer service that the CDN provides.
The good news is that there are dozens of different CDN providers available on the web today, and they all come with various benefits to offer. If you want to prepare your site and your business for phenomenal growth, make sure you start with a CDN system.
Are you ready to grow your company and take your eCommerce efforts to the next level? In addition to signing up for CDN services, check out this list of top WooCommerce plugins to help your business grow.
Have you ever used a CDN to help deliver site content faster to your visitors? If so, we’d love to hear all about it in the comments below!
Thanks . I work through my site which generates maximum revenue for my business .Especially when the majority of my business comes from different geographical locations I will immediately look into it . The page loading speed is a also not that great so I am sure even in that context too this will help .Also , next time you could include some pricing suggestions too so that we could actually get some ideas about the literal costs involved .