When your website has reached the ultimate level of success, receiving high volumes of traffic daily and expected to grow exponentially you don’t want slow website speed and security issues to slow your growth down. A report from eMarketer retail sales worldwide across e-Commerce is forecasted to reach $1.9 trillion with projected growth expecting to reach $4 trillion by 2020. To secure your share of that revenue pie, you’ll need an even faster and more secure website that outperforms your competition. To ensure your website’s performance is at its optimum to meet this demand you will need a CDN.

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Improve Website’s Performance

As a web user yourself, think of the times you’ve had to wait for a website to load. Remember how impatient you got? Perhaps you’ve even abandoned couple of slow websites altogether. Website load time is essential for running a successful website. Online users have very short attention spans and studies show that users expect websites to load within 2 seconds. Websites bogged down with huge images, broken links, and other debris slows down your load time. It could really cripple your website’s conversion rate. Ultra fast website speeds ensure that user abandonment is low and conversion rates high.

Need for speed Research?

Having a slow loading website negatively affects your traffic and page views, conversions, sales, your brand image and perception with users. Therefore, if you want to stand out in the crowd of your competitors having a fast loading website is crucial. It can mean overall success of your business and helps give your users an optimum experience. User experience is important to make certain that you create a loyal customer base and helps you build a strong brand.

It is believed 0.25 seconds of difference in page load time, faster or slower, is the magic number dictating competitive advantages for online businesses. Testing your website’s performance can be done with a few tools.

Diagnosing Your Website’s Problem

A great way to diagnose your website’s performance and ensure it passes the test is to study your customers’ behaviour while they are on your site. You can monitor your customers’ through the analytics of your site. If they are coming and going quickly then website load time may be the issue, especially if you have experienced growth in your traffic.

One way to test your website’s performance is to use a professional SEO tool which compares your site’s loading speed against all of your major competitors. Aim to be the fastest of the bunch.

How to Test Your Website Speed?

Now that you have a better understanding of why website speed is important, the next step is to test your current website speed before going through optimisation.

High outcomes on website performance tests have proven to lead to more sales and conversions. What’s more, is that when Google looks at your website’s performance, your website’s loading speed will help your page ranking and how high your website index in the search results; and the goal is to be on page one.

So what is a CDN anyway?

A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of interconnected servers dispersed all over the world that is calibrated to use geographical proximity as the main criteria for distributing cached Web content and web pages to end users.

For instance, your website is hosted on a server in London, England. Someone from Los Angeles, California, is browsing your website. This person expects of fill their cart with products from your fabulous inventory. However, product pages are loading a bit slow. This is due to the long distance for the data to travel between the server and your end user/would be a customer.

To mitigate this, a CDN finds a server that is much closer to or within the United States. It then bridges the gaps between those side jaunts to serve up your content to the American shopper. Thus, your website loads efficiently eliminating user abandonment.

Using a CDN service means that your website’s content exists on multiple servers around the globe, ensuring your content finds the shortest avenue to your end user according to their geographical location. Content travels at lightning speed ensuring your website is at optimum performance levels.

Why do you need a CDN?

Having a CDN is essential if you want to cast a wide net across the e-commerce community and by extension the planet because it makes your content available to everyone. There are excellent benefits in using a CDN for your website.

It improves your website’s speed and overall performance.
Provides your customers with an optimum user experienced due to faster loading times.
Prevents your website from crashing. CDNs distribute bandwidth across multiple servers as opposed to having one central server handling all the traffic.
Improves your website’s SEO, since faster websites rank higher on search engines like Google.

Advantages of using a CDN for Website Owners and End Users

For Website Owners

A Lower Network Load:

A CDN redirects the end users requesting certain content to the edge servers, and thus the network load is greatly lowered to an extent. This lowering improves the overall performance of a website exponentially while preventing any potential server rashes. This prevention is due to the network load being balanced by the CDN.

Lowers Content Delivery Costs:

A side effect of lowering the network load also leads to the number of users viewing a webpage on your site is decreased, which lowers your content delivery costs and makes way for higher revenue. This also increases the capacity of each available server in the network; ensuring that scalability is possible during peak traffic times.

Protection against DDOS attacks:

Another advantage of using a CDN includes increased security for your website. The Cloud solution within a CDN offers protection against nasty DDoS attacks by preventing it from happening before it reaches the data centre. This works because of the servers being located all over the globe and thus providing a more secure

Content Availability 100% Guaranteed:

CDNs ensure that multiple copies of your content gets dispersed to many servers around the world. In fact, it makes your site’s content 100% available at all times to every end user. This enables you to be a provider of quality service to your customers, and offer a great user experience due to optimum website performance.

For End Users

Your customers will experience reduced latency since the content is received faster.
Less packet loss due to the content being distributed over a shorter distance making it an improved user experience.
Increased security for sensitive information and banking details.

In the end, a CDN helps you pass your Website’s Performance Test

As a website owner, you want your reach across the globe to be limitless. You desire to bring in more users, expanding the reach of your brand and increasing your revenue. Using a CDN service will greatly increase the overall quality user experience of your site. It will boost your website’s performance, speed and security.