Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): A Beginner’s Guide

Have you ever visited a website that took too long to load?

There’s nothing more annoying than slow-loading sites. Especially if you’re attempting to access important content or purchase something quickly. Scrolling through pages can take a long time. Like loading one after another over slow speeds, which not only affects user experience but also affects the ranking of your search engine. 

Actually, 47% of users expect a web page to load in two seconds or less (Kissmetrics).

A slow-loading website could lead to the loss of traffic, sales, and rank on searches. Google lists page speed as a ranking factor. Hence, a slow website may dilute your SEO efforts. It’s not only about speed—it’s also about making sure your content is available to users around the world, irrespective of where they are.

So, how do you implement it? 

That’s where Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) help you. CDNs help serve your website more quickly by caching content and delivering it from servers closer to your users. If you use a CDN, you can greatly reduce your load times, improve the experience for users, and boost your SEO performance as well. 

In this article, we’ll explore how CDNs work, their advantages, and how they can help you optimize your website speed and performance.

What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of servers spread out across the globe. It helps deliver website content like images, videos, and pages faster to users.

Instead of fetching content from a single server, a CDN delivers it from the closest server to the user. This boosts speed, reliability, and performance. 

Over 50% of the top 10,000 websites use CDNs to improve their sites’ speed, reduce loading times, and secure data from cyber threats. CDNs help websites perform better and provide a smoother experience for visitors.

How Do CDNs Work?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) allows websites to be delivered more quickly, by having copies of your content on multiple servers across the globe. These are the edge servers. They keep cached copies of your website’s images, videos, HTML files, and JavaScript. When the user requests the webpage, CDN will return them the content from the nearest edge server (also called Point of Presence or PoP).

PoPs are places where servers are distributed throughout the world. Utilizing PoPs allows CDNs to serve their content closer to the users and, in turn, at a much higher speed. Less distance between the two results in quicker loading time.

When a user accesses a site, their request is directed to the nearest edge server. Now, if the content has been cached there, the server returns it directly. Otherwise, the server retrieves content from the main server and caches it at the PoP for future use. This still reduces the time it takes to load the page, which can speed up websites.

CDNs simply put, cache content at many edge locations, and serve it from the closest one. It also improves the performance of websites worldwide by reducing latency.

What Are the Benefits of CDNs?

The benefits of CDNs are numerous and help enhance website performance as well as form the backbone of core network infrastructure.

Improved Website Performance

Latency is reduced by serving content from edge servers closer to users by CDNs. This reduces load time and guarantees a faster experience for the millions of website visitors, regardless of world location.

Reliability

CDNs add another layer of reliability to websites. Since the content is served from many different servers, if one server goes down, the backup servers can continue serving the content with the least amount of downtime.

Scalability

Very high numbers of requests are handled without requiring extra infrastructure from the customer side. During these times of high web traffic, they automatically scale so as not to slow down the website.

SEO Benefits

There are multiple ways that CDNs can enhance your search engine rankings. For one, they increase page speed by serving content from the closest server. Google loves what we call "fast web" and having a faster load time will increase your rank in search results. 

Using CDNs also leads to lower bounce rates. Also, if the pages load faster, it is very likely that the users want to stay and read your content. And that improves user experience.

The other advantage is better crawlability. As CDNs serve content more rapidly, this means Googlebot can crawl and index your pages faster. Ensuring that search engines can read and index your content correctly improves your SEO performance by giving it life!

Further Read: What is Crawl Budget? How to Save it and Solve the Indexing Problem

Improved Website Availability

With the help of CDNs, your website remains operational even during traffic boost or attacks, such as a DDoS. This resilience enhances the accessibility and experience of your website/users.

How to Set Up a CDN on Your Website

CDNs offer speed, performance, and security enhancements to websites when implemented properly. So, here is a clear, step-by-step guide to help you get your website integrated with a CDN. We will use the common CDNs like Cloudflare and AWS CloudFront as examples.

1. Choose a CDN Provider

First, choose a CDN provider. Common choices are Cloudflare and AWS CloudFront. Both are user-friendly, but they have different functionalities. Cloudflare is simple when you start. AWS CloudFront is better for large websites and for websites with Amazon services.

2. Sign Up for a CDN Service

After you’ve chosen a CDN provider, create your account. For Cloudflare, you’ll have to sign up and add your website by entering your domain name. With AWS CloudFront, you would log into the AWS Management Console and create a new CloudFront distribution.

3. Update Your DNS Settings

Once you have signed up, your CDN provider will provide you with new DNS records (in the case of Cloudflare, this is done automatically). The first step in connecting your CDN to your website is updating your DNS settings with your domain registrar (the service where you purchased your domain name).

• For Cloudflare, the records are set automatically, once you add the site. All you have to do is update your nameservers with the ones given by Cloudflare.

• For AWS CloudFront, you will create a distribution and get the DNS address. You will then in your DNS settings point your domain’s CNAME record to this address.

4. Configure CDN Settings

You then need to configure your CDN settings. There will already be preset defaults for both Cloudflare and AWS CloudFront. But you will be able to modify them as necessary. Here’s what to do:

• Cloudflare: Configure caching rules and SSL certificates (if using secure connection). With Cloudflare's dashboard, you can enable automatic caching for static files (images, CSS and so on).

• AWS CloudFront: You can define things such as cache expiration time, SSL for secure  connections, and the type of content to be cached at edge locations in AWS.

5. Activate the CDN

After configuring the settings, activate the CDN on your website. Once the changes are made, your website will begin using the CDN to serve content to users from the nearest server. It will speed up load times and improve performance.

Testing and Optimization

Once you have a CDN up and running, you can monitor how effective it is. Testing helps make sure your CDN is serving content efficiently. Here's how to do it:

1. Use Website Speed Testing Tools

After successfully configuring a CDN, you can test your website speed. These tools will help you estimate how much time your website takes to load. And find places that really need to be improved. 

The Ettvi Website Speed Checker tool is a simple but powerful tool that shows you how quickly your website loads and provides detailed performance reports. Go to the tool and insert the URL of your website in the specified box. Then select the desired palace in the box below and click the “Check” button. You will instantly get detailed insights into your website speed.

Monitor CDN Performance

Cloudflare and AWS CloudFront both offer a dashboard to view your CDN statistics. Check for metrics such as the cache hit ratio (a measure of how many times your site’s content is served from the CDN instead of your server) and response times (how fast a CDN serves content). A good cache hit ratio and fast response times indicate your CDN is working well.

Optimize Your CDN Settings

You then can tweak things based on the results:

Cloudflare automatically caches your content (images, CSS, JavaScript) by default. But you can also specify cache expiration times for different types of content. If specific content keeps changing, make expiration times shorter.

AWS CloudFront allows you to have fine-grained control over cache behavior settings. So your business-critical content can be served as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Conclusion

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is essential for improving your website’s speed, security, and performance. By storing content on servers close to your users, CDNs reduce loading times and improve user experience. This helps websites load faster, which is crucial for SEO rankings. Google loves fast websites, and a CDN can help boost your position in search results.

CDNs also increase reliability by ensuring your website stays up even during traffic spikes or attacks. They handle more visitors without slowing down, making your site more scalable.

Setting up a CDN is easy, and with providers like Cloudflare and AWS CloudFront, you can quickly get started. Once your CDN is set up, make sure to monitor its performance and adjust settings to get the best results.

In short, CDNs help your website run faster, stay secure, and improve your SEO rankings.