A content delivery network (CDN) is a set of servers scattered across the planet, helping you deliver content to users faster. So, the most important thing you will need for a faster website is a CMS with CDN.
Understanding CDN and Why It’s Important for Your Team and Business to Have a CMS That Supports It
Research shows that if a webpage takes 5 seconds or more to load, the website loses approximately 50% of its primary audience and 80% recurring visitors. From these statistics, it is evident that reducing the wait time for visitors is one of the most important features, if not the most, that a website should have.
While a reliable CMS platform helps in achieving this to an extent, a CMS with CDN can drastically improve the response time and, evidently, user experience.
This article will tell you everything you need to know about CDN—in non-technical terms—and why it is crucial that you have a CMS that has CDN as a built-in feature.
A CDN-Less Scenario
The internet is everywhere. If you have a hosted website, it’s available everywhere, too. However, the website and all the content within are stored somewhere, at a physical location, from where it delivers content to visitors across the world.
Let’s assume that your website is hosted in San Francisco, California. When a user loads a webpage on your website, it fetches the content (including images, videos, CSS, JavaScript) from your server in San Francisco and displays a view to the visitor. It works perfectly fine if the user request is coming from San Francisco or from anywhere within California.
But if the requests are coming from Canada, China, Cuba, or Chile, your content needs to travel a lot of distance before they reach where they need to be displayed. Moreover, if many users are requesting for the same content at the same time, the server gets bogged down and may take more time in managing the load and queuing up responses. Quite naturally, the speed of content delivery is affected as a result. The website may experience higher latency and longer page-load time.
This is where CDN comes in.
CDN Speeds up Content Delivery and Increases Website Load Time
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a wide network of servers spread throughout the globe. The static assets and dynamic content of your website are cached and saved in all these servers.
When any visitor requests for a page – from Canada, China, Cuba, or any other location – the website fetches cached content from the nearest server and delivers it to the visitor locally. In this case, the content is not required to travel across the globe; it’s always around the corner. So, the speed of content delivery is lightning fast.
Contentstack: A CDN-Enabled CMS
Contentstack is a headless CMS platform that enables faster content delivery through its reliable web framework, cache policies, and several other features. It has always ranked amongst the fastest content delivery platforms available in the market.
And now, it comes with a fully setup CDN.
This means that if you are using Contentstack to manage content for your website, lightning fast content delivery comes by default. You do not need to spend any maintenance time, money, or efforts from your side. Everything you need is preconfigured.
Four Major Benefits of a Content Management System with CDN
Apart from the major benefits of using a headless CMS, here are some other benefits that you get by using CDN-enabled Contentstack.
- Better reliability and response times. When a page request is made, the content is fetched and delivered from the nearest server, rather than from the original server. This ensures that content is always available and is delivered even in cases of high visitor traffic, intermittent spikes as well as server outages, resulting in better customer experience and satisfaction.
- Accurate analytics and intelligence. CDNs provide data about the end users such as user location, device types, browsing patterns, and upcoming trends across the globe. This data helps in getting critical and actionable insights as well as intelligence into the visitor base.
- Reduced costs. A CDN eliminates the need to invest in advanced infrastructure and several high-priced servers across the globe. It enables you to achieve similar results by investing a fraction of amount in a global CDN that can be managed through a single platform and reach millions of users. For Contentstack users, CDN comes as a free feature.
- Improved SEO rankings. Search engines love fast sites. They take speed into consideration in their SEO ranking algorithm. Moreover, due to quick page loading time, the bounce rate is usually quite low compared to slower sites.