To many, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver content when you can do so without one makes no sense. After all, hosting is hosting, and hosts do all the work of a CDN anyway.
But CDNs are slowly becoming the standard in the world of hosting, and the fact that more than 60% of the top 100k websites nowadays are using CDNs is proof of that.
The answer is a lot. We’ll give you nine reasons why you should consider using a CDN to deliver your content.
1. Your Website Will Load Faster
Speed is an important factor for internet users, and most of them will avoid a page or move to the next search engine results page (SERP) choice if a page takes more than 4 seconds to load. The gold standard is 2 seconds or less.
By using CDN, you basically assure your users that they will have content from your site located in a server near their browsing location. This helps significantly reduce delays and image loading times, and we all know that pictures play a big role in the overall user experience a website offers.
There are tools that can help you clock image loading times and optimize it, and we suggest you give free test sites like Cloudinary a try before adding pictures to your posts.
Also, a lot of websites nowadays add GIFs to their posts, and we all know that GIFs are the best. But they are also larger, meaning if you want to add them, you’ll need a CDN to deliver it to users on time.
2. CDNs Can Boost SEO On Your Page
We already explained how speed affects user experience, but having a faster page can boost your search engine optimization (SEO) score as well since Google considers page load time as one of the factors that determine rankings.
Most blog sites use CDNs, and if you aren’t sure just how much you will gain by going for a CDN, you are free to test a traditional host and a CDN-based website to see how they perform. The results might surprise you.
If you decide to use a private blog network (PBN) to boost your SEO score further, there are some PBN hosts who also use CDNs. Check out reviews from Private Blog Network on these hosts for further info.
3. Better Performance Than Traditional Hosts
Okay, traditional hosts are all good, but they are slowly falling behind when it comes to handling phenomenons like traffic spikes—you know, the traffic that a certain site or blog gets once one of its pages goes viral.
The spikes in traffic can overload a web host, and cause the site to have longer loading times and, in some cases, even go down.
And having a page down at a peak period can turn away a lot of existing and potential users, and also affect your SEO score negatively.
Also, with the size of the average web page increasing by more than 200% since 2010, and still growing every year, traditional hosts will have a hard time keeping up with this trend—and this is why a CDN can come in handy.
4. There Are Affordable Options
CDNs are considered to be an expensive commodity and one reserved only for industry giants, but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, there are web hosting companies that offer their CDN services at premium fees, but there are also affordable ones.
There are CDNs that specialize in and offer image-only hosting, as well as subscription plans designed for small and medium pages, so it’s safe to say that you can find a plan that will suit your needs and budget.
5. Highly Reliable
CDNs are not faultless, and a server can go down from time to time, but the good thing is that they are optimized to reconfigure the data stream and delivery process to the next point, which will offer the highest speed.
If there is a certain post or image that is getting a lot of heat (getting a lot of clicks and visits) in a short period of time in a specific area, the CDN server node in that area will not get easily overloaded as it will put other nodes to the task of helping with the delivery of data.
6. A CDN Can Reinforce Website Security
Hackers and malware are still a problem, and website hacking and infecting are as widespread as ever. Nowadays, it’s not just about stealing a website or finding a backdoor to push illegal content on a site. Nowadays, hackers settle even for just putting pages down and kicking them down repeatedly. They usually do this by carrying out Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which are meant to overload your server.
But the good news is that CDNs provide great protection against this.
Remember how we said that CDNs do well with traffic spikes, and it’s hard to overload a server that’s part of a CDN?
Well, the same applies here. Your decentralized network will almost certainly stay up, and if you want to reduce the chance of these attacks being carried out, you can install an SSL certificate which can help mitigate DDoS attacks and reduce the time hackers can have a hold on a server (if they somehow get a hold of it).
7. Multiple Platform Compatibility
CDNs are compatible with most platforms, and setting them up on one takes little to no time at all. The most popular platforms like WordPress, Joomla, and the like have a plugin that you can install, which will enable you to implement your CDN.
8. Lower Bandwidth Consumption
With CDNs, not only will you gain speed, but you can also save a couple of bucks.
CDNs can lower the bandwidth your origin server uses, as they will do most of the work (around 60% of the total bandwidth).
And since some of the data from your site will be cached on CDN servers, there will be less data that needs to travel from the origin server, reducing both bandwidth consumption and loading speed. Win-win.
9. Wide Reach
As you know, Google tries to show people pages that are located near them or hosted near them. So by having your site on multiple servers around the world, your business can have a wider audience, and your site will keep coming up in results more and more.
CDNs are perfect for anyone who wants to transition their business from local to global.
Conclusion
Hosting is important for the performance and reputation of your website, and with all the benefits listed above, there is one thing we can say with confidence: CDNs are slowly pushing traditional web hosts into history, and they will become the hosting method that everyone will use in the future.
If you are still unsure about whether CDNs are right for you, find one of the many CDN providers that offer a free trial and see for yourself.