Understanding How A CDN Works

August 12, 2015 / General Discussion
CDN

There are many companies out there that offer CDN services. A Content Delivery Network, or CND, is capable of delivering your content to users. Below, you will be able to discover all there is to know about the CDN and how it helps you and your website.

Purposes of CDN

 It is estimated that your website’s viewers spend approximately 80 to 90% of their response time downloading the various elements of your web page. This includes a variety of different elements. Some of these will listed below for your consideration.

  • Graphics
  • URLs
  • Scripts
  • Text

Each of these takes a little bit of time to load. Also, media, software, and documents all take a significant amount of time to load, so it is essential to take action to ensure that your site loads faster than normal. Many webmasters believe that getting rid of assets is the most effective way to speed up their sites, but this isn’t the case! Instead, it is best to rely on a CDN.

How The CDN Works

 As mentioned above, a CDN is capable of speeding up your website and making it load much quicker. How is this possible? Well, the CDN is actually a type of distribution network of servers, which maintain cached versions of your site and all of its content.

This information delivered to the user much quicker. It should know that your website’s server and the end user’s location will play a major role in the load time of your site. If the two are further away, the load time increases. This can also decrease your business and revenue!

Of course, the CDN is capable of rectifying this problem. Since all of your content stored on various servers, it distributed from various locations. This allows the end-user to access your site from a server, which is much closer and quicker.

This is achieved, by relying on a comprehensive and efficient algorithm, which will be explored in more depth below.

  • Servers that require fewer jumps, in order to deliver the site’s content
  • The server, which is closest to the requesting client depending on the number of network seconds
  • The server, which is currently most available and has the highest level of server performance

Take note that the CDN will utilize a number of different techniques, in order to lower load times. Some of these will explored below.

  • Load Balancing – The CDN is capable of balancing out the load and sharing the responsibilities among various servers and caches.
  • Caching – The CDN is smart enough to capture and store caches of your site’s most popular content. This makes it readily available to end-users.
  • Request Routing – This server alters the end-users path to the content and ensures that the path delivered is quicker and more efficient. This can work by directing the user to the closest node or the node, which has the best performance and capacity.

Innumerable Benefits of CDN

Your website content, files, and images thoroughly replicated across the CDN, which will determine the overall premium location to deliver this content to your visitors. CDN offers innumerable advantages including, but not limited to:

  • Speedier load times
  • Higher performance
  • Superior user experience
  • SEO improvements – Google always ranks faster websites at the top of the ranking page
  • Traffic surge protection – A sudden traffic hick settled with load distribution across global servers, which are capable of serving the content more effectively.
  • Network glitches and DoS attack protection – If the server is disabled by large-scale attacks and malfunction, your website content will be protected and available to specific users.
  • Internal asset backup, archive, and storage service through the use of storage across the global network.

 CDN Combined With WordPress

 For example, when an image is downloaded on your website, it will instantly be replicated on the CDN. In return, the URLs are rewritten, along with the link to a location on the CDN.

This will make the CDN totally responsible for presenting this content to all of your visitors, which will increase the load time of your website. Your visitors will surely be very happy and return to your website very often.