Why Do You Need a CDN for your WordPress Website?

What Are the Benefits of A CDN Service for Your WordPress Hosting

Online business has never been bigger! If you’re planning to use a WordPress hosting to conduct business or are already doing it, you need to make the best out of your website in order to succeed. Attracting clients is getting harder and harder and one needs to take many factors into consideration when fighting for profit.

One of the main factors (if not the main even) for bigger audience and customer growth is the page loading speed of your website. There are tons of surveys showing that a user will leave a web page if it takes more than 4 seconds for a page to load and a properly configured CDN is one of the best ways to achieve it.

1. What is a WordPress CDN?

CDN is an abbreviation for Content Delivery Network and refers to a geographically assigned group of servers that work collective in providing rapid delivery of Internet data. With a CDN all Internet-related matter like HTML pages, CSS and Javascript files, images, audio and video are transferred a lot faster. Nowadays most of the transferred web content is delivered via CDNs and this includes some of the most popular websites worldwide.

CDNs reduce bounce rates and bandwidth consumption costs from the hosting. This is happening through caching and decreasing the amount of data that comes directly from the original server. Another huge benefit of CDNs is that they provide some protection against malware and simple attacks; they provide security certificates improvements and DDoS mitigation.

Last but now least using a CDN provider would increase your website’s visibility and redundancy. We all know that hardware and software failures, weather conditions and huge amount of traffic can disturb the normal functioning of a website. As a result of its shared nature, the CDN is able to handle a bigger traffic amount and endure any kinds of failures better than the original website server.

In short using a CDN brings only positive values to your website and we see no point at all to neglect it, so check if your WordPress hosting provider offers such service!

2. How Does a CDN Work?

As we said a CDN is basically a network of servers that work together and serve one aim – to deliver Internet content as quickly and safely as possible. In order to explain the full content path we need to introduce the term IXPs (Internet exchange points). An IXP is a location where different Internet providers link and thus grant access to traffic coming from each of them. A CDN will basically place a server exactly at the IXP. By being placed exactly at this point the CDN provider is capable of delivering data fast and reduces the WordPress hosting costs.

In addition to that a CDN provider would place servers at critical locations across the continents in order to reduce the distance between the user and the website data. That way when the users try to open the specific URL they don’t have to connect to the original website server – the CDN allows them to connect to the closest data server and thus reduce page loading time.

Reducing page loading time is also due to CDN optimizations such as file compression and minification. The smaller the transferred files are – the faster they reach the user. Another method of speeding up a website is to use TLS/SSL certificates, which enable connection reuse and TLS false starting.

3. Why Do you Need a CDN for your Website?

What are the website profiles that would prosper from CDN? If you share large media files, gain extensive traffic from all around the world and consider loading speed to be vital then using a CDN is a must. On the other hand if your website represents a small local business, targets and receives traffic only from a clear-cut geographical location then using a CDN shouldn’t be a priority for you, as you don’t need to focus on many international visitors.

Let us see what you will gain if you are part of the first group and are thinking to adopt a CDN service. First of all, your website will provide the same awesome user experience despite the country. This includes avoiding tech problems, malware protection and fast page loading time that is equal for all regions. These pluses will affect your SEO ranking as the popular search engines will identify your site as a quality online destination.

Some of the big WordPress hosting firms will provide reports, a dashboard full of information and a devoted support team as part of their CDN service. Last but not least we need to mention the money factor. As unusual as it may sound but using a CDN service will actually cost you less than paying for a foreign server that can support big amounts of traffic.

4. Conclusion 

If you want to be competitive in the modern online market you need to be up-to-date with the current tech service trends…and using a CDN for your WordPress hosting is definitely one of them. Unlike the popular fashion trends there are clear benefits that come with CDN usage and everybody can determine how important they are for a specific website. We’ve covered the most important assets like fast page loading, lower bandwidth costs and an overall good user experience.

In any case if you plan to spread your business to an international audience, using a CDN service is a must as no client will be tolerant to slow speeds or visualization bugs. Nowadays we need to be perfectionists to gain profit and a CDN helps us in that aspect!