How to improve the speed of your website?
Content Delivery Network ( CDN)
What is CDN?
CDN is a content delivery network that provides an option to deliver your website content to end users via a server that is close to the end users. To minimize the distance between the visitors and your web site’s server, CDN stores cached version of its content on a group of servers in data centers that are strategically located all around the world. The cached version of the content is also known as the point of presence (PoPs). Cloudfront has 24 data centers all around the world. These servers are responsible for caching the website and delivering them to the end users.
What are the different CDN providers?
Cloudflare, Cloudfront, CDNsun, MaxCDN, Akamai, Fastly, etc are the various providers out there providing the Content delivery network services. The cheapest option is the CDNsun.
Why is CDN important?
The speed of a website is very vital for retaining a customer. Customer tends to abandon the website if slow. According to Amazon’s research once second in slowness can cost them an estimated 1.6 billion dollars in annual sales.
How to Improve the speed of your website?
There are many factors and combinations that go into building a website.All of these can boost the functionality but can also slow down your website. So the first step you need to take towards improving your website is to improve your Code of your website and configuration of your server. Please read my previous article for more detail on steps you can take to improve the speed of your website.
After following the steps you should see changes in your website speed. You can tally the changes using tools like Pingdom.
How does CDN work ?
To understand how CDN works let’s first look at scenario without CDN
When a user makes a request to a webpage via a browser. The browser sends the request to the server and the server has to then deliver the request back to the end user. The speed of this transaction is directly dependent upon the proximity of the server and the user.
Scenarios with CDN
CDN puts your content in many places at once. When a user makes a request via a browser. The browser sends the request to the CDN server that is close in proximity. For example ,when someone in New York accesses your Europe hosted site, it is fed by local US Pop. This is how CDN works in simple terms.
