Every startup, SME, and major MNC wants their business to be spread worldwide, and you must be one of them too. That means potential target audiences worldwide should be able to experience and interact with your website (and even buy your products or services from anywhere).
You can go for WordPress, the most widely used content management and web development platform for the best websites. It can help you create a fast, secure, user-friendly, SEO-friendly, scalable website with little to no coding experience.
But sometimes, even the best CMS may not be able to help reach a worldwide user base. And even if it does, the users may experience performance issues, like slow loading and rendering issues, on the website.
In that case, there is one thing that can help you improve your website and offer a better user experience to customers around the world, i.e., CDN or a content delivery network.
So in this blog post, we’ll learn about CDN, its working, and its benefits for WordPress websites.
What Is A CDN & How Does It Work?
Content Delivery Network, or CDN, is a group of interconnected servers distributed in geographical locations worldwide to deliver website content to users around the world. Installing CDN caches the contents of a website on servers located in different geographic regions.
So when a user visits the website, the contents on it are delivered from the server geographically closest to the user. That effectively reduces the latency and load times and improves the performance, security, and scalability of the website.
Content delivery network servers around the world liaise with the main server to provide the users with cached and new content.
For example, if you are trying to buy something in India from a US-hosted website, the content on the website will be quickly delivered by a CDN server closest to your location.
However, if the content is delivered directly from the primary server, it will take a long time to load the content on the website.
Benefits Of Using CDN For My WordPress Website
Although WordPress is quite frequently used, thanks to being fast, secure, user-friendly, SEO-friendly, scalable, etc., it is still not without issues, especially concerning performance and security.
That’s why top WordPress agencies around the world recommend using a CDN for their websites.
So let’s check out the benefits offered by the content delivery network for WordPress websites:
Decreased Server Load
A content delivery network ensures that the static files on the website, like images, videos, etc., are cached on the CDN servers in different geographic locations around the world.
So when a user tries to open the website, a nearby CDN server delivers it instead of the main server, taking the load off the latter.
Although it may not seem much, when there is excessive traffic, the load (on the main server) reduced by the CDN servers is quite significant. That ensures your server won’t crash, causing your website to be offline.
In essence, the more the number of CDN servers, the lower the load on the main server.
Improved Website Speed and Performance
In the case of no content delivery network, the browser sends the user request to the main server, which may be located quite far away. That means the data will have to travel long distances to reach your browser so that you can see them.
But with CDN, copies of the website content will be stored on the CDN servers in different locations worldwide. So when you try to open a website, the request from the browser will be sent to a CDN server closest to you, and the data will be relayed from there.
So it will have to travel a much shorter distance, reducing the latency and load times and improving the speed and performance of the website.
Besides caching the content, CDN helps optimize the images and other media files to reduce their size yet maintain their quality. That further improves the speed and performance of your WordPress website.
No Geographic Barriers
Another great benefit of using a content delivery network is that your business won’t be limited by geographic barriers.
As you already know, with a CDN, the files are cached on CDN servers located in multiple regions worldwide.
Take, for example, Amazon Fulfillment centers, which are warehouses spread around the globe. Just a few years ago, if you ordered a smartphone from Amazon, it would have taken a few days, and even so, not everyone would have been able to order them.
But now, everyone (regardless of their location) can order a smartphone from Amazon, it will be delivered from one of these fulfillment centers in just a couple of days.
Just like that, with CDN, when a user or customer tries to access your website from anywhere, the contents are delivered from the CDN server closest to them. That means anyone, regardless of their location, can access your WordPress website effortlessly without any significant speed and performance issues.
Moreover, with a CDN, you can ensure a more consistent user experience for your users and customers around the world.
Improved Security
A significant advantage of using CDN on your WordPress website is improved security. Websites are often vulnerable to security threats like DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attacks, which can overleaf the server and crash the website.
So you can use a content delivery network to set up an extra layer of protection between the website and threats like DDoS. CDN offers advanced security features like firewalls and intrusion detection systems, which help identify and block malicious content and traffic before they reach the server.
CDN can also help protect your WordPress website from security issues like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Moreover, SSL/TLS encryption offered by CDN ensures the data transfer between the website and the users is protected so that significant data info like login credentials will be secure from hackers.
Cost Savings
Content delivery networks can also help ensure cost savings for the website. First, there are hosting costs. By reducing the load on your primary server, you may be able to use a less expensive hosting plan, which can help bring down the hosting costs.
Additionally, CDNs often charge based on usage. So if you have high traffic spikes, the CDN can help absorb the extra load without incurring additional hosting costs.
CDNs can also help reduce the developmental costs of WordPress websites. Since it has a wide network of servers around the world, if one goes down, the main server will automatically route the traffic to a different content delivery network server. That would ensure the website will continue to operate without any hitch.
Moreover, since the content delivery network offers built-in security features, you won’t have to develop and implement your own security reinforcements.
So, with a more stable and reliable infrastructure, excellent performance, and advanced features, you can effectively reduce the developmental costs of a WordPress website.
Increased Audience Reach
Since CDN is a network of servers located around the world, potential users and customers worldwide will be able to access your website.
Moreover, by serving your website’s content from multiple locations, a CDN can help reduce latency and improve the user experience for users in different parts of the world.
Nowadays, with 5G and high-capacity RAMs, people are only interested in websites that open fast. So if you employ a content delivery network in your WordPress website and get a faster speed and performance output, more people will be interested in visiting your website and checking out your products and services.
Moreover, speed and performance are two of the major factors that help gain “upvotes” from the search algorithms. So a content delivery network can help you achieve higher positions on the SERPs.
So overall, CDN can help you reach a wider audience through global coverage, faster load times, improved SEO, and mobile optimization.
Better Mobile Experience
Did you know over 58% of website traffic comes from mobile devices? So it’s important to have your website optimized for mobile usage as well.
In that aspect, a content delivery network can be beneficial as it helps improve the experience for users and customers using mobile devices by optimizing images and videos for smaller screens, compressing files for faster load times, and using a more responsive design.
By delivering content from servers closer to the user’s location, CDN reduces the load times and improves performance to ensure a better user experience and lower bounce rates.
Moreover, CDN ensures a website loads quickly, even on a weaker connection, without using too much data, which further improves the user experience, resulting in better engagement.
These are just a few reasons why you should implement CDN on your WordPress website. But even though WordPress is quite a user-friendly website development platform, you may find it a little tricky to implement a content delivery network on your website.
In that case, you may hire a WordPress developer as they have the necessary skills and experience for the same.
Top WordPress Plugins For CDN
A significant reason behind the popularity of WordPress is its massive repository of free plugins. Anyone can use these plugins to add a range of simple and advanced features without any coding expertise.
Some of these plugins can also help integrate a content delivery network for the performance optimization of a WordPress website. Let’s discuss 3 of these content delivery network plugins in brief detail:
Jetpack
Jetpack – Created by Automattic, this plugin has more than 5 million active installations and can help you with a variety of things, including security, backup, performance, and, yes, CDN.
It includes a free content delivery network service that optimizes your images to decrease their load time and serve them from its robust network spread around the world.
Moreover, Jetpack has partnered with Google AMP to ensure that WordPress websites load on mobile devices more quickly.
LiteSpeed Cache
With over 4 million active installations, LiteSpeed is a great plugin for boosting the performance of a WordPress website, and one of its best features is CDN. QUIC.cloud CDN Cache comes free with this plugin.
So you can ensure that users can access your website in no time at all. You can also use it with other content delivery network plugins like Jetpack.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is one of the plugins most frequently chosen by WordPress developers for caching the website and delivering its content to users around the world through CDN and other performance optimization practices.
Its high-quality content delivery network integration and management means that users can access the media and other content files of a website from anywhere around the world with ease.
So if you want to integrate a content delivery network into your website to improve its speed and performance for better ranking on the SERPs, choose any of the above-mentioned WordPress plugins.
Conclusion
Speed and performance are among the most important aspects of any website. No matter the features and appearance, if your website doesn’t load and perform well, people may click off of your website.
One of the best ways to enhance the speed and performance of your WordPress website is CDN (content delivery network). It reduces the server load, improves the speed performance, and security, ensures cost savings, increases audience reach, and even improves the mobile experience.
WordPress has several plugins in its official library that can help add a content delivery network to the websites, and a few of the best, most-installed ones are LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, Jetpack, etc.
Furthermore, if you want more features and support you can choose a premium CDN WordPress plugin and a plugin that is very popular is WP Rocket which is a powerful solution to boost loading time, pagespeed, and performance.
So if you want to implement CDN in your WordPress website, either install and configure one of these plugins or hire a WordPress developer to add CDN manually.
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