In the digital age, viral marketing is one of the most powerful tools for business owners. Marketing gurus always strive to create promotional campaigns that incite the social media fraternity to spread the word. Not all marketing campaigns are successful, but the ones that do ‘go viral’ generate a lot of traffic to the website. In case the website is not able to handle the sudden surge in users, it adversely impacts the business reputation.
This makes one wonder:
If you have not heard about CDN, then you have been missing out on the trick used by most developers today. As the name suggests, CDN is a network of servers that helps you deliver content to people visiting your website. It mirror’s data on multiple servers, due to which the traffic load gets shared between the replicating servers. This, in turn, leads to a better user experience.
CDN has data centers or Points of Presence (PoPs) around the globe. Each PoP has many servers which help improve the speed of content delivery to the site visitors.
CDNs are configured to automatically serve the site-visitors who are geographically close to them. This helps curb latency (the delay between sending a request to load a webpage and viewing the page on the screen) and improve the transmission speed to the end-user. CDN will create a cache of all static content in the regional PoP. In case the user requests a file that is not available with the CDN, it loads the file from the main server.
Businesses need to focus on improved user experience in terms of speed. By creating cache servers around the globe, CDN can help in distributing website traffic across multiple servers.
Here are some benefits of CDN:
1. Quicker page loads
2. Effective management of high website traffic by load balancing.
3. Reduced consumption of bandwidth as content is made available locally.
4. Prevents attacks to your website and secures your web application(s).
5. Enhanced user experience, as the server can handle peak time loads.
Yes, you do!
Don’t take our word for it; let’s look at some numbers:
LoadStorm posted a report on the impact of web performance on conversion rates. According to this report:
1. 25% people abandon the website if it takes more than four seconds to load.
2. For mobile sites, the patience levels are much lower and 74% of users abandon the site after waiting for five seconds.
3. 46% of site visitors do not return to a poorly performing website.
Further, a one second delay in load time can lead to around 16% dip in consumer satisfaction which obviously translates to fewer page views and a drop in the number of conversions. Waiting for half a second causes a 26% increase in frustration levels of site visitors which invariable means decreased engagement levels. Many businesses identified this pattern in user behavior early on and focused on improving the load time of their sites (website and mobile). Mozilla made its pages faster by 2.2 seconds and saw a phenomenal growth in the number of Firefox downloads (60 million additional downloads per year).
CDN can improve your site’s performance leading to better user engagement and better conversion rates.
CloudFlare is an industry leading CDN provider, especially for small blogs and websites. In order to ensure optimal website performance, HostGator India provides the following features with Shared Hosting:
1. CDN is enabled for all websites hosted on Shared Hosting.
2. The CloudFlare plugin helps easily configure and manage static content for all websites on CloudFlare’s CDN network. The plugins is available on both cPanel and Plesk control panels.
In a nutshell, CDN is a decentralized method of optimizing your website’s performance. It helps users interact with your website through content stored in cache servers locally. With ever-increasing content available for consumption and ever-dwindling attention spans of end-users, it is imperative that website owners provide a consistent, fast and seamless experience to all users accessing their websites.
