We are now pleased to offer our clients a CDN package to improve the performance of your website. This package is particularly helpful if either your website has a lot of images, or you have visitors to your website from all around the world.
If you’ve not heard of a CDN before, you probably have a lot of questions like what is a CDN? How does a CDN work? Does it cost me an arm and a leg? (spoiler: it won’t)
This blog post will hopefully answer all the questions you have and help you decide whether a CDN package would be a good idea for your website.
What is a CDN?
A CDN stands for ‘Content Delivery Network’, and you would certainly not be alone in thinking that you’ve never heard of it before. But in fact, they’ve been around for quite some time now. Did you know that over half the traffic on the internet at the moment is served by a CDN?
This is because most large businesses such as Facebook, Amazon and Google all have their own CDN, and they’re used to improve the loading times of websites around the world. But just because the big boys of the internet use them doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother having one for your own website.
A CDN might sound self-explanatory, and to a certain extent, it does do what it says on the tin. A CDN helps with the delivery of the content (mainly images) on your website through a network of different servers. But what a CDN does is put all your images onto different servers around the world. This means that wherever you are, your images are sourced from the quickest server that you can reach, and your page load speeds and images are loaded much quicker.
How Does a CDN Help Me?
If your website is hosted on our server, it’s currently sitting on UK cloud-based servers. So when someone visits your website, all of the content and images comes from the same place and is transferred to the user’s phone or computer.
This is fine if your clients are in the UK, as our server is never that far away from them, and it doesn’t take that much time for them to load your website. But what if you have someone in Australia that wants to visit your website. Their computer or phone still must access the same UK server, and because it’s so far away (even for technology), it will take a long time for the page to load.
Another instance of when a CDN comes in handy is if you have lots of visitors to your website at once. This might be because you’ve just posted an interesting blog post that people want to read. If there is one server dealing with all these visits to your website, it’s going to slow your website down.
You know the well-known phrase ‘A problem shared is a problem halved’ – A CDN works on this kind of principle. A CDN is able to use multiple servers at once to help one person or hundreds of people load a page. What this means is there is never too much work for one server to manage.
To show you just how much a CDN improves your page load speeds; here’s an example of our own site, showing that across the world. We have speeds that score at least 97% based on PageSpeed score and a load time of 1.2 Seconds!
Why Should I Care About Page Load speeds?
One reason you should care about page load speeds is that it affects your customer’s experience. Studies have shown that for every extra second it takes your page to load you lose 7% of your traffic.
It’s not just conversions that you need to consider. For over a year, Google has been taking into account the loading speed of a page to help determine page rankings on their search engines. What this means is the longer it takes for your page to load, the lower down in the search results you will appear.
Where Do I Sign Up?
We’re offering our CDN package to all of our clients that don’t have an E-Commerce website. This package costs £100 for the initial setup and full website optimisation and then £10/month to continue hosting on our CDN.
If you’d like to add this package to your website, or you have any questions about our CDN, please get in touch with us.