As websites become more involved and must perform faster to be useful, website design services must continually find newer and better ways to accomplish this. Content Delivery Networks or CDNs are a newer technology that has been developed to help web designers create sites that are faster and more efficient. CDNs are the next progression in data center hosting and something every web design company should become familiar with.
What Is A CDN?
A Content Delivery Network or CDN is a network of connected servers positioned in different geographical locations. They are strategically placed to facilitate data delivery to users closer to those locations. CDNs hold redundant versions of static webpages that are served to site visitors based on where the request is made.
This method reduces pings and latency since requests are filtered through multiple channels to reach the viewer. CDNs are becoming important to website design services that are seeking new ways to reduce page load time and increase site performance in addition to the standard optimization methods currently in use.
How Do CDNs Work?
A content delivery network works by connecting website viewers to the data they are requesting via Points of Presence (PoPs) and Edge Servers. PoPs are the physical locations where servers on the CDN are located and globally located. Edge servers are the actual data servers on the CDN.
The way that CDNs work is fairly simple. Data is first uploaded by a web design company through a "push zone," which is the central server on the CDN. Servers in the push zone sync copies of this content to the edge servers in the various PoPs.
When content is requested from a "pull zone," which is a viewer’s computer located within proximity to a certain PoP, it is served from the cached copies on the edge servers. In doing so, web designers can achieve faster page load speeds, even for more complex websites.
What Are the Benefits of Using a CDN?
From a web development standpoint, CDNs offer website design services many benefits that can make their sites more effective in achieving design and marketing goals. Faster page load times positively impact brands and their websites in the following ways:
- Better User Experience - The average user will only wait 2 to 3 seconds for a page to load. When pages are served faster from multiple locations, users are happier and web designers see greater overall performance from their sites.
- Better Traffic Handling - Redundant pages served from multiple locations allow the same website to handle exponentially more traffic than those served from only one location.
- Improved SEO and Pagerank - Faster loading time, happier visitors, and more traffic are all factors that every web design company knows are essential for building SEO, which makes CDNs highly effective in improving pagerank.
- Increased Sales and Conversions - The trickle-down result from these positive effects is more user conversions and increased sales. Where design and marketing are both concerned, this is the main goal that all web designers strive to achieve.
Site speed and efficiency are more important than ever before. By using a CDN to host their sites, website design services can improve their performance and obtain better results for clients. A web design company working with clients to attract national or global audiences can greatly benefit by implementing CDNs into site development and marketing plans!