What is a CDN? Impact on SEO and Website Performance

content delivery network

A CDN (Content delivery network or content distribution network) is a network of servers located in different locations. The CDN network stores your website files to ensure that the user surfing your web page can receive the copy from the nearest possible server for fast execution.

The main idea behind a CDN is there is a measurable amount of waiting time, also known as latency for those who is far away from your hosted server. This results in the slow response time to users and high changes that your user will bounce back without opening your site or spending much time. So Content delivery network capitalizes those routing issues and improves latency as per your technical performance and user metrics consideration.

A CDN can be the best scenario for a website that has heavy traffic from all over the World to facilitate their user by fastest loading time. It also helps to improve a performance of websites that stream large video files or processed high-resolution media files. Using a CDN for youtube is the best example as per application.

However the idea of Content delivery network can be discarded for small local business and if the site is targeted to one small geographic location.

 

CDN and Search Engine Optimization

When google has started using a page speed and user metrics as one of the important ranking factors to consider, the content distribution network is getting more popular and application of CDN is growing. As content delivery network allows faster loading time, it will be better user experience resulting more revisits, more impression, more clicks and ultimately more conversion. That means you have a good SEO score.

The best approach is to optimize your site for users, make your site mobile compatible, improve website’s page speed and consider a reputable content delivery network providers for your online business. Some of the reputable CDN companies are Cloudfare, Amazon CloudFront, Cachefly, Fastly, MaxCDN etc.