Everyone loves a speedy website, especially when customers tend to wait less than 5 seconds for a page to load before leaving. Customers leaving your website without getting what they want can mean your bounce rate goes up, you lose a return visit, or you miss out on a potential sale or lead. Most importantly, it’s damaging for your brand’s image if the site doesn’t load fast enough. In short, a slow site plays into the hands of your competitors.
One of the main causes of slow websites is having many images or assets to load. As we all know, having beautifully designed images on your website. Of course you can’t reduce the number of images or assets to increase the page loading speed. However, if your customers are located all over the world or your website is hosted in London but your customer base is in Birmingham or Edinburgh, then you want to make sure that the distance from your server to them causes as few problems as possible.
Optimising your images is a great way to reduce their size without sacrificing the quality of the image but it still doesn’t solve the fact that your customers are miles away from where your website is hosted. This is where a CDN comes in to bridge that gap.
What is CDN and how does it work?
A Content Delivery Network is basically a server that’s located much closer to your customer and has all of your images and assets stored on it. The best thing about a CDN is they are located all over the world in a network which means you can cover the world and take your website and business into the international market.
If you imagine that your website is hosted in the UK and 30% of your users are from China, but you don’t have a CDN in China, then the website is going to very slow for your Chinese customers. The content will be delivered to your UK customers at a super-fast speed but it could take 10 times longer for your Chinese customer. Search engines will pick up on this and so if your competitor puts a CDN in China then they’ll most likely rank higher than you as the site will be much faster to use and so more customers will switch to your competitor. The CDN will help resolve this issue as the images will be stored on a server closer to the user in China and therefore your website will be as fast as it is for your UK customers.
How do you set up a CDN?
To set up a CDN buy a dedicated CDN from your hosting provider. Your images and assets will be moved onto a subdomain on your website by your developer and this subdomain will be hosted on the CDN. When your pages loads the images and assets will be pulled from the CDN whilst the rest of the website is pulled from your main server. By having the images on your subdomain rather than a separate domain, it helps your main domain rank for these images in Google’s image search.
Want Verb to set up a CDN for your website?
We can get this set up quite easily for you with a bit of development work. Get in contact with us or call us and we’ll be happy to explain the process to you.