Content Delivery Network (CDN) : Importance and Usage of CDN

Content Delivery Network (CDN) can significantly increase the page loading speed. In this article, we will discuss what is Content Delivery Network (CDN), its usage and importance along with needed WordPress Plugins.

In our previous article Speeding up your website using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), we discussed the basic points of using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

In this article, we will discuss what is a Content Delivery Network (CDN), how it works, why we need to use Content Delivery Network (CDN) and about few WordPress plugins for Content Delivery Network (CDN).

What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and how it works?

Content Delivery Network or CDN is a collection of multiple geographically distributed servers to distribute the static content more efficiently to the user. The End user has access to a copy of the data closest to the his /her geographical location, as opposed to all visitors accessing the same main server, to avoid the physical data transfer bottlenecks.

Notice the language :  “… to distribute the static content more efficiently…” .  Content Delivery Network (CDN) can only be used to deliver the static content like Static HTML files, CSS Files, Java Scripts, images, compressed documents, Audio and Video. It can not be used to store dynamic files like PHP.

For WordPress, there are several plugins which can synchronize the updated, modified or newly added static files.

Most common example of  using Content Delivery Network (CDN) service is perhaps the image or rich media Advertisements. The image and rich media are delivered through a Content Delivery Network for faster loading of the Ads.

Look at this test from webpagetest, this one of our website:

We are using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed up it. It loads within 1.5 seconds; simply because the  Content Delivery Network delivers one static component, at that time a dynamic content is loaded from the main server. The impact of not using a CDN : this website takes 3 seconds to load:

Yes the http requests are less in the first; you can add 0.5 seconds to equalize : within 2 seconds.

Importance and advantages of using Content Delivery Network (CDN)

• Excellent page loading speed
• Good performance on Google Search Engine result page
• Decrease in % of bounce
• More pageviews
• Increase in revenue

Important WordPress Plugins for Content Delivery Network users

Basically most Content Delivery Network (CDN) service providers will give you their own Python based program to synchronize or upload data to blob. You just need to adjust the setting in WordPress Cache Plugins.

Best possible type of server for using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

For our usual servers those are used for Blogs, either Dedicated Server or Virtual Private Server (VPS) work nicely with a good Content Delivery Network (CDN). It is very important to tweak the configuration rightly to get the maximum benefit from the Content Delivery Network (CDN).