If your website targets worldwide, then you might already know that distance from the server to the user can introduce latency – an effect of distance. Latency is basically the time it takes to make a round trip from the server, to the user, and back to the server again. The longer the latency gets, the longer it can take to download a file. The cause is quite technical so we won’t get into that, but rest assured distance does take its toll on load speeds.
This is where Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s) come into play. CDN’s are designed to serve content to users as fast as possible based on their geographical location throughout the globe. The basic principle is to mirror your data such as images, videos and other large downloads to several servers, and geographically place them where your users are.
For example, your main site may be hosted in the United States but your visitors come from USA, Europe and Australia more than any other country. In this case, you would have 3 sets of CDN servers, one in USA, one in Europe and one in Australia. This way the users will be served content from the server closest to them. This will increase speeds and give the user a more pleasant experience when browsing and downloading from the site.
With Google Caffeine and site speed being introduced into ranking results, it is important that your site perform as quickly as possible, and a Content Delivery Network helps to ensure this.
A CDN doesn’t just offer faster speeds to those it’s closest to either. Browsers will often only download 2 items at a time from each hostname. This means if you have a lot of JavaScript files or CSS files, it will load them before continuing to load other items on the page. This limits you to 2 connections while it waits for those items to download. If you have CDN, you are essentially giving the browser more than one hostname to download from, so the browser can connect to more and download in parallel the files required for displaying the site.
In turn, this makes the content download faster and display more quickly on the browser, and prevents the user having to wait. Most users won’t wait more than 4 seconds for a page to load so be sure you’re not losing visitors by having a slow loading website.
CDN’s don’t have to cost the earth either, with companies such as Amazon and the S3 Cloud, you can set up a CDN in no time for very little cost.
Below is an example of what a CDN could look like:
About the author:
Posted by Andy.
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.