Frequently Asked Questions
The data shows that most mobile and desktop users will abandon a website that loads too slowly. According to recent data from Google, 53% of mobile site visitors leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load, and most research shows similar numbers for desktop users.
It’s obvious that site speed is extremely important, but when was the last time you checked your website’s speed? And when you checked it, did you check it from different locations? Did you know that your website visitor’s geographic location can have a massive impact on how fast or slowly your website loads?
A CDN solves the problem of slow load times by caching your website on servers all over the world, ensuring your visitors get fast load times and better site performance, no matter where they’re located. If your website receives traffic from different locations around the world, or even around the country, you should use a CDN. CDNs are especially important for commerce websites, mobile apps, media sites, enterprise websites, tech websites, and financial sites.
There are CDNs that offer free options and free trials to allow users to see the improvements made to their website, their customer experience, and their bottom line. BelugaCDN offers a free trial of the CDN Pro Plan, which provides you faster load speeds, higher availability, SEO rewards, content protection
The main use of a CDN is for improving your website users’ experience by speeding up the website. Other uses include:
Higher availability: since the CDN will be serving your content with virtually unlimited capacity, you have the freedom to automatically scale up & down with your traffic needs.
SEO Rewards: Google and other search engines reward websites using CDNs with higher SERP rankings, due to the increased speed and security CDNs provide.
Save money: Larger files take longer to transfer. When your data is compressed on a CDN, it takes up less space and can therefore reach your customer much quicker.
Content production: CDNs allow you to protect your content by putting flexible key and proxy authentication in place, to protect “premium/paid” content.
Security: CDNs provide increased security against certain types of cyberattacks, like DDoS attacks, while also reducing the risk of downtime and increasing data security.
A CDN shortens the path that your website has to travel to get to the user. This speeds up your website in a couple of distinct ways:
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It provides faster load speeds for your users
A CDN stores static content and delivers it from the server geographically closest to your user, ensuring the website loads for them as quickly as possible.
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It gives you the ability to handle traffic spikes
If your blog post or video or ebook goes viral, is your website prepared to handle the increase in traffic? A CDN can ensure that you’re ready to handle a sudden, unexpected traffic spike, because it caches your static content for quick delivery, putting less pressure on your server.
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It helps your content get indexed faster
Google favors websites with CDNs, and gives priority to websites that load quickly. This leads to Google crawling your website more frequently, leading to quicker indexing of your content in the search results.
To ensure maximum load speed for a hosted website, a CDN places its servers at internet exchange points (IXPs), which are the primary physical exchange points where internet infrastructure companies connect. By maintaining a presence in these high-speed locations, CDNs are able to ensure high-speed load times.
As CDNs become more prevalent, CDN security is becoming a growing concern. CDNs need to protect against a variety of cyberattacks, including forward loop attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and data breaches.
There are a couple of things any prospective CDN user should do before choosing a CDN.
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Carefully evaluate the CDN
Some CDNs are more secure than others, and it is important to weigh the risks of one CDN against another. You should learn how the CDN caches your data and how often pen testing is performed to ensure server security. You should also ask what happens if the server fails. Asking these questions can help steer you make an informed decision about which CDN to use.
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Make sure the CDN is compatible with your SSL
If you collect sensitive information from your users on your site, you need to ensure that the CDN you choose is compatible with your SSL certificate, to ensure the sensitive data from your site is still encrypted as it travels through the network.
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Use a good web application firewall (WAF) to ensure security of your site. A WAF sets rules to control the flow of your incoming and outgoing traffic, preventing DDoS, brute force attacks, zero day attacks, and application targeting attacks. A good WAF increase the benefits of using a CDN.