In today’s competitive business environment it’s necessary to capitalize on every available technology that can improve your company’s online performance. One technology, available for over a decade and gaining traction lately is the content delivery network. Affordable CDN can help companies to accelerate the delivery of content, absorb peak traffic period loads and help to deal with the problem of geography.
Let’s take a look at four areas you should examine before migrating to a CDN. Before You Migrate
To maximize affordable CDN performance, first examine your website and metrics. It’s important to look at where your traffic comes from. If most of your business and traffic are local, a CDN may not be as effective. If your customers come from all over the globe, or you feature rich web content, or audio and video streaming, a CDN may be the right choice.
The first step is optimizing your site.
• Are performance issues due to slow application components?
If upon analyzing your website, you find issues with the application elements you are employing, then this will need to be addressed before you migrate. A CDN will not make a slow application run faster. It will however move information to your customers faster.
• Is your site’s performance optimized?
Often companies turn to CDNs to address issues that need to be solved in house. Make sure to design your pages properly to ensure long-term performance. While a CDN will improve performance in the short-term, it won’t fix problems with design.
• How are you measuring page response time metrics?
If your site features third-party content, look at your load times based on just your content versus full-page loads. If third-party content is slowing you down a CDN can’t help you. Measure usable time, how long before it is usable to a customer. If they can interact before the page is completely loaded, factor this into your decision.
• Will CDN offer the benefits you’re looking for?
Affordable CDN can be a cost effective decision if you measure the costs versus results. A CDN should make delivery of your content worldwide efficient and fast. If this speed results in higher revenue and a better customer experience a CDN is a great choice. If yourtraffic is mostly local, a CDN can still benefit your business but the you may not see the return on investment as quickly.
Migrating your site to an affordable content delivery network is a good business decision. Make sure before you do you optimize your site to take full advantage of all the benefits a CDN offers.