E-commerce sites, media sites, software publishers... Many sectors can benefit from a Content Delivery Network. A CDN enables you to handle peaks in activity without oversizing your original servers. Your company gains in agility.
Internet users, both private and professional, have developed a taste for fast connections. So woe betide poorly optimized sites and online services. The verdict is in. When it comes to bounce rate (percentage of users leaving a mobile website after the first page viewed), speed is the factor with the greatest impact.
DOM response time (the time it takes for the browser to receive and analyze the page's HTML code) also has a major impact: the higher it is during a visit, the higher the bounce rate.
According to a study by Google and SOASTA (a performance analysis company), DOM response times for sessions with bounce were 55% higher than for sessions without bounce.
How a CDN works
Page layout, site ergonomics and image optimization are all determining factors. But still too few companies rely on the performance of a CDN to accelerate the loading speed of their site. Yet the benefits are obvious for certain activities. For example, accelerating graphic display can boost revenues for e-commerce sites.
This "content delivery network" is made up of different servers distributed geographically around the globe. This platform of servers can optimize the delivery of content, including Web applications and streaming multimedia content. Today, the majority of Web traffic is served by CDNs, including traffic from major sites such as Facebook, Netflix and Amazon.
A CDN consists of two types of servers:
- origin servers, which are used to introduce content into the network;
- peripheral servers in different geographical locations to replicate the content of the original servers.
It's not a recent technique, but its purpose seems obvious: to bring content closer to the user! Thanks to a routing mechanism, a CDN directs users to the server closest to them.
Initially, its role was limited to improving content delivery by replicating commonly requested files (static content) on a set of globally distributed caching servers. But the popularity of CDN services continues to grow as new features are added.
Key benefits
A CDN goes beyond simple "caching", allowing you to optimize your site in a number of ways.
1 - Improving site loading times
Regardless of the browser or device used, pages are displayed more quickly. This reduces bounce rates and increases the time visitors spend on the site. In other words, a faster website means more visitors stay longer. Remember that Google uses loading time as one of its criteria for ranking sites...
2 - Reduced bandwidth costs
Thanks to caching and other optimizations, CDNs reduce the amount of data an origin server has to supply. This reduces hosting costs for website owners. Whatever the origin of your content, this minimizes the need for servers located in multiple international datacenters.
3 - Increased content availability and redundancy
High traffic levels or hardware failures can interrupt normal website operation. By relying on a distributed architecture, a CDN can optimize access even in the event of malfunctions.
4 - Strengthening website security
This is not a well-known asset. But with the proliferation of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, a CDN is looking less and less like an ancillary or superfluous service.
This distributed network can be used to quickly identify attacks on your site and block the hackers' IP addresses. This technique (complemented by other security solutions) greatly reduces the risk of site downtime or disruption.
By "relieving" pressure on the infrastructure, a CDN represents an opportunity to improve quality of service, and therefore business. But you need a specialized partner to help you choose a high-performance offering with a suite of self-service tools: network security, application performance management and monitoring, live streaming tools...
