Using CDN to Power Up and Boost Your WordPress Website Performance
WordPress is a CMS platform that is widely used by website owners to effectively manage and publish their content on the site. But a lot of users think whether they need a Content Delivery Network for their WordPress blog or not. Many users are not even sure about what a CDN is and if you are now aware of what it is, then you are only going to wonder whether it is a right thing to invest time and money or not.
So, before we discuss whether you should actually use CDN, let’s take some moment to understand what a CDN actually is.
What is a CDN?
CDN or Content Delivery Network makes the websites load very quickly all over the world and it consist of network of servers that are geographically dispersed. This network helps to deliver the cashed content to end users in different users and this concept is based on how close the geographic location of the user is. The origin of the content also plays a great factor and so does the content delivery server. The servers are designed to host and deliver the copies of your WordPress static site content like images, JavaScript, CSS and video streams.
How does a WordPress CDN work?
First of all, you should never get confused with CDN and a WordPress host. Both of them are completely separate devices and a CDN is not a replacement for your web hosting service provider. But it is an additional means to increase the speed of the website for all the users spread across the globe.
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The CDN basically helps to copy important parts of the site and then disperse those parts to various servers and data centers in different locations. Now the users in different parts willing to access the site can easily view the vital parts of the site from their nearest data center, instead of using a single data center where the site is technically stored.
If the server is far from where the request has been generated, then there will be a great delay involved in the transmission of the data over the network. More the distance, the greater will be the delay.
It also takes various networking hops to serve the data request from the browsers to the hosting servers and again the requested content from the hosting servers to be back from the web browsers. It is here that the CDN comes into play as it helps to lessen the latency by loading the website content from the nearest server. The CDN servers are also at times referred to a point of presence.
Why should you use a CDN for your WordPress website?
There may be various reasons why you should choose to use a CDN for your WordPress blog:
Performance boost:
Performance is one of the biggest reasons of using a CDN and it has proven that faster landing site often helps with higher and increased conversion rates, longer average viewer’s duration and also a decreased bounce rate. As per statistics:
- A 1 second delay in the page response might result in a 7% reduction in conversions
- Approximately 53% visits to any mobile sites are abandoned after about 3 seconds.
- A survey by BBC has seen an additional 10% loss of users for every additional second that it takes for the site to load.
Quick delivery with caching:
Just as you use caching with WordPress host or any plugin, similarly CDNs also uses caching and this helps them to deliver so fast. But always remember how caching works. When a CDN gets a copy of the media it has to be requested many times by the visitor before it is cached on the CDN. But once the content is cached, it becomes very easy to deliver it at the right time without having to wait for long.
Huge savings with GZIP Compression:
WordPress CDN uses GZIP, which is a file format that is used for file compression and decompression. It helps to reduce the size of your HTML, JavaScript files and style sheets. But this will not work on images. A 70% reduction due to compression is an easy means to optimize and transfer data faster.
High availability and scalability:
CDN also offers high scalability and availability. As the content is replicated across multiple POPs at various geographic locations, the web traffic is also dynamically routed to another server in case any one goes down. CDN also helps to keep your website from crashing as it helps to handle most of the load.