Are you thinking about speeding up your website, reducing bounce rate and improving user experience?
Slow websites can have a direct effect on SEO and overall sales. They will destroy the UX and lead users to search for faster websites.
If “will CDN speed up a website and improve SEO?” is also your question, we are going to share the reason why content delivery networks can help you in both scenarios.
Everything about Content Delivery Network
Before we get into CDN’s benefits for speed and SEO, let’s dive into how a content delivery network works. CDNs shorten the path information must travel between user and server. CDNs are networks of servers located in multiple geographic places. When users access a website, information is pulled from the server closest to them rather than traveling to the origin server. As a result, the website will have a faster flow of data.
CDNs’ network of servers is called points of presence or PoPs. Each of these servers (PoPs) is spread in different locations across the world. The CDN location nearest to where the user accesses it is called an edge server; once users request content from a server through a CDN, they will be connected to the closest edge server. This will ensure that the user will receive the best experience possible. In our article, what are the benefits of using a CDN, we talked about its advantages, but to name a few:
- CDN will offer faster load times for content on a website, increasing performance, especially on mobile versions.
- CDNs session optimization will reduce the number of open connections to the web server.
- CDN can scale quickly when there is increased/heavy traffic to a website.
- CDN ensures a website’s stability by minimizing the risk of traffic spikes at the point of origin.
- CDN provides better site performance and user experience.
- CDN allows the system to cache or temporarily store a website content on a CDN, so in case of a request, data will be delivered from an edge server to the user faster than before. This way, the content will travel from the nearest PoP and back instead of traveling from the website’s origin server and back.
- CDN removes and updates the website content regularly to ensure the most relevant and current content is delivered. This is called content invalidation.
Also read: What is CDN, and how does a CDN Work?
Will CDN Speed Up a Website and Improve SEO?
Earlier, we mentioned that the answer to this question is yes! And we are going to explain why. Let’s break this question into two sections and answer each of them separately. CDN can speed up a website as well as improving its SEO elements. Here is how.
How CDN Speeds Up a Website
In our blog post, 5 Reasons Why Your Website Is Too Slow, we discussed the top five reasons why a website might perform slowly and take longer to respond.
CDN will provide low latency and high data transfer speed. Content Delivery Networks are built to speed up content delivery. A website with perfect speed will have high performance, a high conversion rate, and growing sales. One of the valuable impacts of CDN is on decreasing latency. What is latency?
Latency is defined as the delay visitors experience between the time a page is requested and when the content appears and loads on the screen or browser. One of the proven reasons for latency is physical distance and heavy workload. As you may know, CDNs will resolve both issues.
CDNs serve the data from the closest server to the user. An improved speed will affect the user experience. CDNs can store multiple content types, and that contributes to faster loading times for users. Since CDNs keep the content, they can deliver them to users more quickly. Files like images, stylesheets, JavaScript, video, audio, web fonts, and other file formats (HTML, PDF, PPT, ZIP, and more) can be stored on CDNs.
Using CDN speeds up a website by asking for data, retrieving it, and sending it to the user shorter. You knew that visitors are more likely to exist on a slow-loading website. With a CDN, the bounce rate will be reduced, and the number of visitors to the website will be increased.
Moreover, CDNs will reduce the load on the origin server, which results in uninterrupted speed. If all the websites’ resources are loaded on the main server, there will be much inconsistent speed and crashes, especially during a high traffic spike. It means a website can get slow and break down completely during the traffic period because of the additional workload. CDNs will optimize the network to handle the high traffic flawlessly, which will also improve efficiency.
How Does CDN Improve SEO?
Since CDN can speed up the loading and performance, it can also improve Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Google has priority for websites that load quickly and are easy to crawl. The more often Google crawls a website, the faster it will determine the content changes and updates related to the content. This quick search indexing will get the content into more search results faster, and it will be widely available to users.
With a CDN, it is possible to enable a secure HTTPS connection and use a new HTTP/2 protocol to enhance the site’s speed and uptime. This will increase the satisfied users that landed on a fast and secure webpage. CDNs reduce the request-to-delivery time. They can store images and deliver visuals directly from PoPs. CDNs can offer significant Search Engine Optimization benefits such as faster load times, image optimization, session optimization, scalability, and security.
A CDN reduces latency and minimizes packet loss, helping to speed up delivering your content to the end-user.
Another significant impact of CDN on SEO is that they help to combat duplicate content issues by using caching algorithms and canonical headers. Google will penalize sites if they host duplicate content in multiple places.
CDNs can handle the traffic peaks and protect against DDoS attacks. If a site shows a server-side crash or a 404, it can be destructive for its SEO because it affects user experience and leads users to bounce away from the website, which is a signal that Google considers in evaluating a site. It might cause ranking loss.
To mention another important impact of CDN on SEO, it utilizes software and hardware efficiently to optimize content storage and access. CDNs have built-in machine learning algorithms, and they make routing and caching decisions in real-time, which will provide optimal cost and storage for the resources. CDNs scalability can help to adjust deployment based on needs and reduce expenses.
As mentioned in this blog post, a CDN can remarkably speed up a website and improve SEO on it. To know more about other benefits of this cloud service please visit AravnCloud CDN page.
