What’s a CDN and should you use one?

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It’s basically a network of servers that deliver static content from websites to users based on their geographic location. So let me break this down for you to try to make it more clear, because it can be confusing. When you go to a website like sumydesigns.com, that website is hosted somewhere. Most websites are hosted on servers that are located in big data centers. Many web hosting companies actually rent their servers from these data centers, and there are many located around the world. Some of the biggest data centers in the US are located in Texas, Illinois, Florida and Georgia.

Let’s say that your website is located on a server in one of these data centers. It’s on a server in Florida. If you are in Portland, Oregon and want to pull up that website, then you will be directed to the closet data center, which will redirect you to the next data center, and on and on until it gets to your actual server. So if you are physically farther away from the server, then the site you want to load will likely be slower to open. We’re not talking huge gaps here, but the closer you are, the faster you’ll be.

What a CDN does is take static parts of your website and puts them into the cloud environment, which can then in turn deliver that content from multiple servers across geographical areas. The result is that your site runs much faster.

Why does speed matter? Because your visitors matter. And they won’t stick around waiting for your site to load.  If it takes more than 3-5 seconds, a lot of site visitors will leave. Another reason is that Google loves fast sites, and your site will rank better.

Should you use one?

Not everyone really needs a CDN. If your website is small, low-traffic site with mostly text and smaller images, then there’s a good chance you don’t need one. But if you have an image heavy website, then you might want to look into a CDN. If you feel like your site is sluggish, you might want to try one out.