As the world transitions to a digital economy more businesses are using the internet and content marketing to reach as many customers as possible. Content marketing is a key component. Your website plays an important role in content marketing. Your website is a great way to sell goods and services worldwide. Your e-commerce website should be fast. A website should load in about 4 seconds, but digitally-savvy consumers today expect loading times of at least 2 seconds.
According to studies, almost half of web users expect web pages to load within 2 seconds. 40% will leave a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds. 79% of online shoppers also said they would not visit a slow-loading site again. Page load times are important from a sales perspective. A content delivery network (CDN), service provider, can speed up the loading time of your website.
CDNs reduce latency and speed up site load times by placing files in different locations. Visitors will spend more time on your site if they have a faster browsing experience. Your revenue can be increased by having high retention rates.
Cloudflare, Akamai, MaxCDN and Amazon CloudFront are content delivery network companies that use web caching, server load balancing, request routing, and server-load balancing to optimize website performance. How can you tell if a CDN works for you?
How do you choose the right CDN?
These factors are important to consider when searching for a content delivery system service provider.
- Performance
- Reliability
- Responsiveness
- Security
- Support/Service
- Prices
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Performance
The primary goal of a CDN is to speed up your website’s loading time. It is therefore important to determine if it can do this. Is the CDN able to deliver your content as fast as possible? What speed will the edge servers process files from users? Two main considerations in this regard are latency (measured in milliseconds) and throughput (measured in kilobits per sec). You should also consider whether the CDN offers real-time traffic statistics analysis, instant purging or upload of files via FTP. It also has an intuitive user interface.
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Reliability
Although it is unlikely that your website will be glitch-free, a CDN should be capable of keeping your website up and running even when there are sudden spikes in traffic. It is crucial for CDN service provider to ensure that your website operates from a “no single-point of failure” perspective. This can be accomplished by routing traffic around downed network server. They might also incorporate additional software or hardware redundancy through agreements with multiple carriers, which allows them to use dedicated out-of band channels for communicating with servers in an emergency.
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Responsiveness
A CDN must be responsive to ensure customers receive high-quality service. The time required for network-wide changes such as blacklisting IP addresses or purging a particular media file from cache to take effect. Your content delivery network company should be able to quickly implement a configuration propagation strategy.
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Security
Apart from speeding up load times, a CDN can also strengthen your website’s security defenses. It should also be able protect your content against DDOS attacks and other types of cyberattacks. Check to see if a CDN provider has the protocol necessary to provide full security for your blog, software, images, and online store.
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Support
Companies that provide content delivery networks must offer technical support to customers 24/7 via email and phone. Their technical support staff should be knowledgeable, friendly, and able to resolve issues quickly.
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Prices
Traditional CDN providers charge high prices for their services. Amazon CloudFront costs $43 per month for 500GB of bandwidth, while Google Cloud is $40. This could increase to $200 per month if you are a blogger. It is recommended to compare plans in order to negotiate the best deal for you. You can also take advantage of free CDN Plans and trial periods offered to you by CDN service providers.
Final Thoughts
Slow websites can frustrate potential customers and drive them away. This is bad news for your business. Poor hosting, JavaScript issues, slow loading images, flash content, excessive HTTP requests, and unoptimized images are all reasons why your web pages take so long to load. Whatever the reason, a Content Delivery Network can improve the speed of your website and increase your bottom line.
