Why do you need a CDN for your WordPress website?

Posted on March 1st, 2021

Search engines prefer faster loading sites over slower sites. It’s same for potential subscribers or customers. When we open a website on the internet, we expect the website to load faster and have great user experience.

But, As internet also runs on the physical cables, distance of the website’s server from your location matters. For example, Let’s say a website “example.com” is on the server that is located in USA. And you are trying to access the website from Australia. In this case, the website will load slower in comparison with person trying to open the same website from USA.

This lag due to distance is called Latency. Usually, even if you are trying to access a website from the opposite part of the world, the latency will be 300-500ms only. These 300-500ms does not matter if a website only consists of a single page and text-only content with no styling. Typically a web page contains lots of resources that results in tens of requests for server to load just one web page. So, the latency adds up as multiple requests are sent to the server to load just one web page.

What is the solution? CDN!

CDN basically hosts your static resources on multiple servers around the world. So that the static files can be served to the visitor from the nearest server with low latency. Now, Let’s understand CDN in detail.

What is CDN?

CDN - Content Delivery Network

A CDN (content delivery network) is a network of servers located around the globe that deliver cached static content from websites such as images, CSS, and JavaScript to the user, based on the user’s geographic location. Usually after the major release, we don’t change the basic CSS, Javascript and Image files for months. Let’s understand CDN with an example.

For instance, Your main server location is India. Someone from the US visits your website then it is going to take longer for it to load compare with Indian users. This thing happens because data has to travel longer distance. This is called ‘latency’. To avoid latency, we can use CDN. The content delivery network is a globally-distributed network of servers that store cached contents of your website. Now if anyone visits your site, the CDN technology redirects them to the closest server to their location.

By deploying your content across multiple CDN’s PoPs(point of presence), you can make your page load faster than before. In short, the closer the CDN server is to where your user is, the faster the users get content.

Why do you need CDN?

With and Without CDN

CDN makes your site better and faster. Also, it can help you to divide your server load, which means you can share your server load with CDN’s PoPs(point of presence). Content served by CDN will always travel the shortest distance to reach the user.

As mentioned earlier, improving load time by delivering your site’s content via a content delivery network is the most common use of CDN.

But, there are other use cases also, following are the other advantage of using CDN.

Improved Speed

Improved speed is one of the best benefits of using a CDN for your WordPress site. CDN hosts static content of your website like CSS, JavaScript, image, video, stylesheets, so if any user wants to visit your site then the resource stored on the CDN will be delivered by the server nearest to the user’s geographic location. It helps you to reduce main latency and due to this your website’s load time will be decreased and make your website faster.

Around 40% of visitors abandon a website if it takes over three seconds to load.

TTFB(time to first byte) can also help you to boost your website performance. This is the measurement of how long the browser has to wait before receiving its first byte of data from the server. The shorter it takes to get data, the shorter it takes to display it on your page.

Improved User Experience

User experience mainly depends on the time it takes to load your website. This is the case for almost all of the visitors who are visiting your website for the first time. Loading time does not matter much for your visitors who visit your website frequently. If your website or blog is quick with rich content, You can boost the growth of the website by significantly improving your website load time.

A CDN can handle all the data a typical website hosts. It means that your server would not have to send all the data to the new visitor. It can only send the dynamic data while the static files are directly served from the CDN.

Significant data Integrity

If you are a website owner. Then you always want to use the updated code to render your content. CDN helps to preserve integrity whenever changes are made to your assets. For example, if any change occurs from your site in static files then changes are automatically reflected across various servers on the network thus preserving data integrity and consistency.

No Geographic Barriers

CDN’s servers are distributed all over the world. Users all over the world can experience your website smoothly. As we know there are many service providers in the market. Keep in mind that CDN’s providers don’t perform the same in every region. Some have a clear advantage in some regions based on their network setup. So, select the content delivery network that suits your requirements the best!

Website Security

CDN provides high-profile website security like bot protection, web application firewall, DDoS protection, etc. But, there are certain features like blocking access on non-HTTP ports with is a common feature in all CDNs, and help you with basic security. Such features are available to everyone.

Website security with CDN is based on the service provider you use. There are many CDN services to speed up your website like Cloudflare, Sucuri, Cachefly, Google Cloud CDN, etc.

Overall, CDN provides many such benefits for your website. By distributing bandwidth across multiple server nodes, a CDN helps you to reduce the load on your main server.

 

Conclusion

It is always a great choice to use CDN for your WordPress website. WordPress repository has many plugins that allow you to set up CDN without any technical knowledge. Even if you have never setup CDN on your website, It will only take less than 30 minutes in total to set up one.

If you are getting visitors from the whole world, using CDN will quickly improve the overall user experience. So, That’s all for this guide, If you have any questions regarding this tutorial, please let us know in the comment section given below.

Leave a Reply