Everyone loves faster loading or speeding up of the content delivery. Also, it is required to take the load off of your web server to the visitors making their experience better! If you make use of Content Delivery Network (aka CDN) in WordPress blog, it helps you experience something worth raving about and load WordPress site even faster than ever before.
WordPress clients are perfect users for CDNs as there is generally a blog type of surrounding is set up. Generally, blog consists of images, fonts, HTML, CSS and Javascripts being embedded in order to maintain its function and form. It is likely that when the website is running at remarkably low speed and viewers are bored to death waiting for the website to open and view the content. It might definitely urge user to close the tab instead of waiting for the download to finish. Thus, a CDN allows the faster serving of this content.
What is Content Delivery Network(CDN)?
A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers or networks, which is effective in speeding the delivery of web pages and other web content with high traffic that have global reach to a user, based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and the content delivery server.
Also, we can generalize it in another simpler way, the distance to the CDN server from the user is directly related to the delivery speed of the web content to the end user. It implies that the closer the CDN server is to the user, the delivery of the content will become faster. Here, the end user is directed to the edge location that delivers the minimum latency ensuring better content delivery speed with great performance. It implies that the closer the CDN server to the user, it helps in accelerating site load times and reduces bandwidth consumption. In addition, CDNs are designed to host and deliver content of WordPress blogs (static or dynamic) such as images, CSS, JavaScript and database. Further, it also protects from sudden bursts in web traffic hitting your server and even block data scrappers.
How does CDN work?
If your site is physically located on a server in the UK, then the visitor from your geographic location other than UK might spend needless seconds in downloading the content and vice versa. With CDN, visitor from location other than UK will be able to download a copy of your site from a server that is located nearby to his physical data center, without consuming any additional time to download data across the ocean.
It thus implies that the servers closest to the web audience respond first to the request ensuring reduced latency and accelerated site load times. Here, the term latency refers to the delay time implying that if the data has to travel farther distance, then it is definitely going to take more seconds of time to load the content. The content delivery network first imitates the web pages to a network of servers that are scattered geographically at various region catching the web content. When the visitor requests a web content which is a part of CDN, it will switch the request from the originating site’s server to a server in the CDN, which is nearest to the visitor and thus delivers the cached content. CDNs also interacts with the server to deliver the content which has not been cached before.
User can know that the CDN has been accessed only when the delivered URL is distinct from the requested URL.
Benefits of Content Delivery System
A question we get asked more often is whether or not a CDN is required for a distinct website. In my opinion, a CDN can be useful in almost every scheme when used integrating with the WordPress sites. Here, we have already discussed a lot about the role of CDN in WordPress blogs and how it works to help you to speed up in the content delivery and make visitors feel experience better. Here, just take a look at few of the many benefits when using CDN to your WordPress blogs.
- Ensures Performance Boost:
An increment in performance is one of the main motivations to make use of a CDN. It has been demonstrated time and again that rapid loading site directly relates with greater conversion rates and reduction in bounce rates and indeed, help you get visitors to stick on your website longer. Furthermore, it allows visitors to experience better due to improved overall performance such as decreased latency no matter from which region you are intending to load the content.
- Reduces Bandwidth Costs and Increases Up-time Guarantee:
The insertion of CDN has helped to raise site’s resiliency. Moreover, it can help unload CPU and other server resources from original server ensuring prevention of large traffic from overwhelming your host. It thus reduces the bandwidth costs due to the distribution of the load among the participating servers of the CDN Network and hence guarantees higher up-time as well.
- Ensures extra security
CDN provider ensures extra security for your site by allowing you to make use of Web Application Firewalls(aka WAFs) for the protection of the server. For instance, take an example that your site has undergone a DDoS attack, then the attacker’s traffic is redirected to other server and help block common DDos attack patterns. This way, your site still becomes accessible from other CDN servers. It helps you putting you behind a proxy which helps to hide your original IP location, though it isn’t fully bulletproof.
- High Accessibility and Scalability
CDNs offer high-accessibility and versatility. Since the reproduced content is accessible over various POPs at various geographic areas, web traffic is progressively directed to another server in case that one goes down. Additionally, scalability of the service has not been an issue as CDN is constructed keeping that in mind. Also, if you are making use of smaller shared host, a CDN could actually help you keep away your website from crashing On the off chance as it is manipulation most of the load.
Conclusion
No matter how good could your website get designed and page content you display, it is sometimes very inconvenient when your site goes down and takes a little longer to load the page. This might distract the visitors to your website and bounce over the another one. In such cases, CDN might help you to get the best out of this. I hope you guys understood the role of CDN in WordPress Blog and can analyze in your own whether or not adding CDN to host your WordPress site is beneficial. If yes, then how much too. Keep Learning and Exploring More and More. Only this can help you to understand the topic more better and master it! Enjoy your time… Cheers!