CDN Image Hosting: Should you use a CDN for your Images?
When you upload images to your website, whether they’re banners on your homepage, infographics on your blog posts, or diagrams on your knowledgebase content, you want those images to load quickly and efficiently for your viewers. Nothing will make your visitors leave your site quicker than an image they’re trying to access taking 30 seconds to load. Even a load time of 4 seconds can increase bounce rates by 20–40%!
So how can you ensure that the images on your website load in a timely manner for your visitors? The best was is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers located in strategic locations around the world, that store copies of your files on each of these servers. When someone visits your site, the site is loaded from the server that they are geographically closest to. This ensures that there is no lag time as their computer fetches your website from a server thousands of miles away from them.
Now that you understand how CDNs work, you should consider using one for your website. Here are the top reason you should use a CDN to host your images:
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Increased Speed
Hosting your images on a CDN ensures that your images load from the server in closest proximity to your visitor. This reduces the physical distance that your files need to travel and reduces the number of steps needed to display the images on the user’s screen. This means significantly faster load speeds for your pages and images.
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Higher Conversion Rates
Faster loading images means your visitors can access and consume your infographics, diagrams, ads, banners, and more, much more quickly than that would on a website that doesn’t use a CDN. This ensures fewer bounces and more conversions, as potential customers are able to quickly and easily access your collateral.
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Security
Hosting your images on a CDN gives you numerous security benefits. For one, it reduces the risk of a successful DDoS attach, and makes it much more difficult to take your website offline. In addition to this, CDNs provide security keys, which prevent people from creating new versions of your images.
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Website Quality
Images hosted on a CDN load more quickly and with lower compression (higher quality) than images that are not loaded from a CDN. This ensures that all the images on your website are high quality and display instantly, so you run no risk of having your customers see broken images and your website looks professional to all your visitors, no matter where they are located.
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Scalability
If you’re trying to grow and scale your business, nothing can hold you back quite like a website setup that you’ve outgrown. If your website is effectively only accessible in your local area, you are alienating potential customers around the country and the world. Using a CDN to host your website and your images ensures that your website grows with your business and remains accessible from all around the world, no matter how big you get.
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Mobile Optimization
To accommodate mobile traffic, which nowadays makes up around 50% of total web traffic, it is essential to host your images on a CDN. CDNs provide automatic resizing of images based on the user’s screen resolution, ensuring that your website is fully optimized for mobile users.
Types of Image CDNs
Self-Managed CDN
A self-managed CDN is a CDN that you build and manage yourself. Self-managed CDNs are usually built and used by large companies with engineering staff who are familiar with the ins and outs of managing CDN infrastructure. There are a few open source CDNs available, which experienced engineering teams may find useful to build a self-managed CDN.
Third-Party CDN
For the vast majority of companies, a third-party CDN as a service option is much more realistic than building a self-managed CDN. Third-party CDNs provide their servers and infrastructure for companies to use for a fee. Because of this, setup is as easy as purchasing a subscription and waiting for the migration to take place. Typically this can be accomplished in 20 minutes or so.
BelugaCDN is a third-party CDN that has 28 server points of presence across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, ensuring effective delivery of your images from anywhere in the world. BelugaCDN’s pricing starts at $20/month, with a one month free trial to start, and the ability to cancel at any time with no fees or hidden cancelation charges.
Interested in learning more? Check out BelugaCDN’s plans today, and get a free trial of a Pro, Business, or Enterprise plan.
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