Have you ever tested the speed of a website? One of the factors that can increase the speed of a website is the existence of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) linked to the website. When your website visitors are located in different countries and even different continents from your website server, it will take longer to display the website pages. This is the CDN’s role in order to provide optimal speed for website landing pages by accessing from the server closest to your website visitors.
What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?
A content Delivery Network (CDN) is a transparent backbone in the internet network that is responsible for delivering website content. Whether you realize it or not, when you access a website page, you have interacted with the Content Delivery Network (CDN). For example, when you are reading this article, you are already using a CDN, because this website is connected to Cloudfare, which is a CDN service provider. When you shop online, watch YouTube, or just view social media (such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter) you may also have accessed content that has been sent via a CDN.
A CDN’s role is to reduce the latency between you and the server hosting website files. The goal is to increase the speed and performance of the sites you access.
Note: Latency is the time it takes for data to travel between its source and its destination, measured in milliseconds
How Does a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Work?
As explained above, a CDN serves to reduce the distance between visitors and websites. The goal is that the time needed to access the website is shorter. CDN stores cache on several storage locations. Each repository closest to the visitor is responsible for delivering the content at the time the website visitor accesses it.
Note: Cache is a process used by browsers and applications to store information. Caching makes applications or websites faster.
Conclusion
In simple terms, a CDN can be interpreted as a place to ‘storage’ your content in several places and provide faster access to website visitors.