In today’s tough economy every business owner is looking for an edge. When it comes to your online presence, improving performance should beat the top of the list. As more business migrates online and websites become more complex graphically and in variety of content (think streaming audio, video and dynamic web content) a content delivery network might be the answer.
Your company website is the motor driving your business. If you rely on it to disseminate critical information, generate leads, and increase sales then it makes perfect sense to have it operating quickly, efficiently and reliably. A content delivery network can help you to achieve your goals. A CDN will solve problems like improving global availability while reducing bandwidth usage and most importantly reducing page latency, or the amount of time needed for your content to load.
Let’s take a quick look at exactly what a content delivery network is, and how it can improve your website’s performance.
What is a Content Delivery Network?
A CDN is a group of networked servers distributed geographically that improve deliveries of both static and streaming content. When a request for content comes into your host server, a CDN automatically routes that request to the closest server geographically to the user.
By caching duplicate data on servers throughout the network, a user accesses your identical content from the server closest to their location. This cache server delivers your information faster, maximizes bandwidth usage (reducing your costs) and helps to direct traffic during Internet or site-traffic spikes. CDNs work to minimize latency issues that can cause image failure, optimize delivery speed and maximize bandwidth for each individual visitor. Result? Maximum performance for your website.
The Many Benefits of CDNs
As search engines continue to refine their algorithms they are taking more factors into account when determining rankings. They are now penalizing sites that load too slowly. As more users switch to broadband there has also been an increase in traffic jams and bottlenecks.Broadband offers little good if the content requested loads slowly. Add that customer attention spans are becoming increasingly short as they expect faster page loads,high-qualityvideoand live streaming.
Hosting your site on a content delivery networks means your content is delivered fast. CDN technology and data redundancy means fail-safe protection from Internet disruption and delivers high-quality content.This increased speed of delivery means an optimal user experience and higher rankings onGoogle and other search engines. Not only will a CDN reduce latency, it can improve the user experience and speed up static and dynamic content, mobile content, ecommerce transactions, gaming and more.
As more host companies enter the CDN space, they are beginning to expand their pricing options. Companies like Togglebox and their scalable “pay-as-you-go” model are making CDN hosting an affordable option for more small businesses. The many benefits of hosting your website on a content delivery network may give your business the edge you’re looking for.