Have you heard of “CDN”? That’s a term often used when talking about website hosting, and although it sounds like something really techie, but the concept is quite simple. And as the modern-day websites tend to get “heavy” with sophisticated new technologies running in the background for fancy functions and visuals, you might want to now the basics of CDN to see if using CDN is right for you.
CDN = Content Delivery Network
“A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver pages and other Web content to a user, based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and the content delivery server.”
webopedia.com
In the Internet world, we have gotten used to accessing data pretty much instantly from anywhere in the world. But think about it, the data still needs to travel between the data origin and you, and the longer the data needs to travel, the longer the data delivery gets. Also, if gazillions of people try to access the same data at the same time (which can easily happen… when a website URL is mentioned in a popular media site, for example, people all over the world can visit that URL at exactly the same time.), the origin server could be hit by so much traffic, it could experience hard time delivering the data to everybody.
CDN is a way to ease up these speed and crowding problems by having multiple servers that serve the duplicate content of the source server.
What CDN Does
Let’s look at an example. In the example shown below, the user is in Span, trying to access a website hosted in the U.S. Without CDN, the data has to travel across the Atlantic Ocean every time the user access the site or even every time he refreshes a page on the site. That’s a long way to travel!
Now with a CDN, while the website data is housed on the server in the U.S., a copy of that site is also saved on other servers across the globe. And depending on the location of the user, the data will be served from the geographically closest server in the network. In the example image below, you see that the closest server to the user in Spain is located in England, and that’s where the website data gets served from.
Now the data has much less distance to travel!
Image courtesy of GTmetrix (https://gtmetrix.com/)
In the image below, you’ll see an example of how this might look on a global scale.
Image courtesy of GTmetrix (https://gtmetrix.com/)
The other popular form of CDN is to host different type of data on different servers. A good example is Photon, an image CDN used by WordPress’ popular Jetpack plugin. When turned on, Photon stores images on your website on a server separate from your own hosting. By using something like Photon, the load on your hosting could become lighter, and your website visitors might find your website running faster.
Benefits of Making WordPress Run Faster with a CDN
Faster websites are known to have more benefits! Here are some…
- Faster loading time
- Better for SEO as Google favors faster sites
- Better user experience
- Increased conversion rate
- All static files are hosted on multiple servers (your hosting + CDN servers) = extra security
Popular CDNs for WordPress Sites
Interested in using CDN? Some CDN services are free, and might be already available via your current host.
Here are some popular CDN service providers in case you’d like to explore:
- MaxCDN (https://www.maxcdn.com/)
- KeyCDN (https://www.keycdn.com/)
- Amazon CloudFront (https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/)
- Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/)
- Jetpack Photon (https://jetpack.com/) – image CDN
