CDN services help you increase the speed of your site. You may have heard about these technologies before, but you want to know more about how CDNs work and the technologies used in them, and how to benefit from them to increase the speed of your site, and this is what we will talk about in this article.
What are CDN services?
To learn about the benefit that CDN services provide to us as website owners in general, and WordPress website owners in particular, let us begin the explanation with the following scenario:
We assume that 3 visitors accessed your website from three different countries, which are “America – Germany – Bahrain,” and they requested your site, which is located on Seer in Germany, for example. In this case, the site loading period will not be the same for all visitors, and that loading period will depend mainly on How close or far your site server is from the country or place where the visitor accesses your site.
For example, let us assume that your site is hosted on the server of one of the companies located in Germany. In this case, visitors to Germany will enjoy the highest site loading speed, while some visitors to other countries, such as America, Bahrain, and others, may suffer from an increase in the site’s loading time.
If you purchase a private server for your site in each of the countries from which visitors come to your site, it will be very expensive and may not be very practical, and therefore CDN services help users access your site as if it is hosted on many servers in each country or in The closest location where your visitors are located. This makes this technology highly specialized in reducing the loading time of websites for its visitors.
The difference between CDN and hosting
First, you need to know that CDN services are not a substitute for the hosting on which your site is located, but rather they act as an auxiliary factor in order to enhance the efficiency and speed of your site as never before.
The difference is that the hosting service hosts your site on a real server located in a specific country.
For example, when you register with a hosting company, you will be asked if you want to choose a specific geographical location to reserve hosting for your site:
But a CDN is an interconnected and synchronized group of servers that are spread in multiple different countries around the world and works to save identical copies of the website content, each copy on a server in a different place, and does not host your website files in their true form.
How CDN services work
To simplify things first, the term CDN is an abbreviation for content delivery network, which is a network of devices and servers spread around the world, which is managed by many companies specialized in this field, such as Google, Cloudflare, and others. These servers, which are spread across many countries around the world, are set up to host various website data and files in more than one copy in more than one country.
CDN services host files and site data, whether they are static sites or dynamic sites, and we explain the difference between the two types in the following lines:
- Static sites: These are sites whose content is not updated extensively and continuously, such as simple blogging sites and corporate sites that only display work to visitors, as well as personal sites that may be a CV and do not contain variable programming commands. These sites do not consume server resources greatly in most cases.
- Dynamic sites : These are sites whose content is changed and updated at a rapid and significant rate, as their content can be updated dozens and hundreds of times per day. Such as websites that operate in the field of e-commerce . This type of site often consumes a lot of server resources.
Steps for making CDNs
Let’s talk about the actual steps that occur when your site relies on CDNs and how the services respond to visitors. Let us clarify that the work steps take place as follows:
- The first step: When you decide to subscribe to one of the CDN provider services on your site, for example, you subscribe to the Cloudflare service , then you register your account and activate the service on your site, in order to do its work on your site by establishing a network that sends stored copies of your site to visitors.
- The second step: CDNs host a copy of your site on many servers distributed throughout the network around the world, so that you can show that saved copy to visitors through the servers closest to them according to their geographical scope.
- The third step: The technologies of these networks begin to work to provide the best browsing experience for visitors to your site, by showing an exact copy of your site to each visitor according to his geographical range and according to the server closest to him. For example, you send the German visitor to a server closer to him than the Saudi visitor, and so on, with the aim of the user getting an experience. Faster browsing your site. Thus, your site appears quickly to all visitors who come to you from all over the world.
What are the benefits of CDNs?
Here are the most important benefits you get from using and linking CDNs to your website:
1- Improving the performance and speed of the site
Website loading speed is one of the most important benefits that your website owner can benefit from. The speed of the site helps in many improvements, the most important of which is increasing the period of the visitor’s stay on the site, in addition to reducing the bounce rate of visitors, or what is called bounce rates, which helps to strengthen the site and significantly increase its efficiency.
On the other hand, CDNs have the ability to improve overall site performance, through some steps:
- Reduce TTFB time
The term TTFB refers to time to first byte, which means the time period or period of time that the browser waits after writing the link to the site in it until it receives the first byte data from the server on which the site to be accessed is located. Therefore, the longer the TTFB period, the longer the time for the site to load for visitors. .
In order to know the TTFB period that the browser waited to enter any site on the Internet, you can easily access this by opening your browser settings, and entering the “Developer tools” option. The development settings window will open for you, in which you click on Network or Networks, then click on Timing, to open this window in which the TTFB period that the browser waited to access the site’s data over the Internet appears:
- Accelerating the opening of the website to visitors based on saved copies
You can also install a WordPress plugin that creates cached copies of your site’s visitors in order to speed up the process of opening the site for them. CDNs also provide saved copies of your site files to visitors who frequent the site, and this technology allows for adding greater speed at the time of loading the site to visitors who frequent it on an ongoing basis, as cache files continue to be saved within CDNs until you enter your CDN control panel and delete it. All those cache files.
- Contribute to compressing website files without affecting their quality by purifying GZIP
One of the most important things that CDNs do to your site visitors is to reduce the loading time of site files, because they compress files such as HTML, Javascript, and CSS files, and the compression is done using GZIP technology , which is a modern technology used to compress files to the maximum extent possible, and at the same time. Time does not significantly affect their quality within the site, as happens with many other tools that compress using traditional ZIP technologies, which may affect the quality of the compressed files.
Therefore, CDNs cause a very clear decrease in the loading speed of sites that contain a lot of files and which can be classified as large or medium-sized sites.
- Brotli modern file compression technology
You may have heard about Brotli technology , which was developed by a team of Google programmers. It is a modern and advanced technology that compresses files at a rate 26% greater than any other file compression technology, such as GZIP. Not all CDNs support this technology, but it is clear that it will be supported primarily in the near future, due to its great importance in compressing files to a new standard level, which contributes to increasing the rate of opening and browsing websites.
- Modern HTTP\2 protocol support
Almost all CDNs and services now support communication technology via the HTTP\2 protocol , which is the protocol developed from the old HTTP. This protocol is characterized by the speed of accessing information at a much faster rate than before, which explains the ability of CDNs to significantly improve the performance and accelerate the opening rate of the websites associated with them.
2- Search engine optimization
At the beginning of the year 2010, Google officially announced that the speed of loading the site would be one of the most important factors that will be used to rank sites within search engines in the search results that appear in front of the user, so imagine the amount of visits that you might lose due to the delay of your site in Google search results, for example. Due to the extreme slowness of the site and its internal pages.
CDNs and the services they provide that will help speed up the opening of the site to visitors, thus helping directly in improving the ranking of sites within search engines, in addition to accelerating the indexing process as well as crawling the site’s internal pages due to improving the speed of accessing and browsing those files. By Google spiders.
3- Reduce Bandwidth consumption
CDNs, through their technologies, also help reduce the resources consumed by your site visitors, which consume the CPU resources of the server on which your site is hosted, which ultimately helps reduce the cost you pay to the hosting company in exchange for consuming Bandwith allocated to you.
The following image shows that one of the sites linked to the CDN service from Cloudflare provided 69% of bandwidth consumption.
CDNs also help reduce the cost of consuming server resources by automatically blocking hotlinking queries from other sites that copy links to images and media files within your site and display them on their sites, which causes the consumption of server resources every time those images are opened or displayed on external sites. .
4- High flexibility and securing sites from falling
CDN services are generally built to reduce the pressure placed on hosts due to the large amounts of queries that occur within them as a result of the things that visitors do within the sites. So if you’re struggling on a small host that experiences high-stress moments, it’s very likely that it will perform better if it syncs with a CDN.
CDNs try to provide many tools and options that reduce the load on the sites themselves, which provides high flexibility for the sites synchronized with them.
5- Better protection for your site
A CDN helps you significantly enhance the security of your site . All service providers provide security options by installing a firewall, which enhances the site’s security from various attacks such as DDos attacks, which have become increasingly targeting WordPress sites during the current period.
This is in addition to CDN service providers providing options to hide the original IP address through proxy technologies.
questions and answers
How important is it to rely on a CDN ?
Let us answer this question that is frequently asked by owners of emerging and small websites, but perhaps all the reasons that we mentioned above in the article will tell you how necessary CDNs are, especially for large and huge websites, which are characterized by containing huge amounts of data and files, and also receive visitors from different countries around the world. the world.
We believe that the best case for subscribing to CDN services is for your site to receive visitors from more than one country. In this case, using a CDN is necessary and will indeed have a significant impact on increasing the site’s loading speed for visitors.
However, let us assume that you own a site that provides services to customers or users only within the city in which you live, and in most cases you do not receive or are looking forward to receiving large numbers of visits from other countries, for example, in this case the use of CDNs will not be urgent and necessary. For you, because your site visitors are located in only one geographical area and linking the site to CDN services will not affect the loading speed of your site.
Let us assume another case, which is that your site targets visitors from Egypt and the Arab Gulf countries. In this case, you may not have to use a CDN if you rely on a server that is already close to the targeted countries.
If you consider the countries or geographical regions from which you expect visitors to come to your site, and if there is diversity in the countries from which visitors come, then you need a CDN. However, if your visitors are located in only one geographical region and visitors do not come from different countries in the world, then You need to subscribe to it and just work to speed up the site using the well-known procedures that we talked about previously .
What are the most popular CDN providers?
Because it is one of the most important technical services that most website owners around the world need, many companies and institutions compete to provide this service to customers in various countries of the world, and among the most famous CDN service providers are:
- Cloudflare : One of the most famous CDN service providers around the world, and they offer free plans as well as paid plans, which vary according to the features they offer in each plan.
- KeyCDN : One of the most famous CDN service providers as well, and it provides many of the modern technologies that we talked about during the article such as: HTTP/2, Brotli and others, but they do not have free plans, and the accounting system is based on the amount of data that is consumed, as their prices start from 0.4 Dollars per gigabyte of data.
- Fastly : It is a CDN service as well. They have servers in many countries around the world and also have servers in North Africa. Their prices start from $0.12 for every one gigabyte of data consumed.
- Amazon Cloudfront : Amazon offers CDN services, as well as additional security layer services, DDoS protection services, and more. You can start with a free plan for a full 12 months without paying any fees, but you will have a maximum data consumption limit of only 50 GB, and you can upgrade at any time to get more capacity and additional services.
Do CDN services vary from time to time?
Certainly, like the rest of the contemporary technologies, day after day they are developed and updated to keep pace with the requirements of the times. Indeed, the first use began in its simple form in approximately the 1990s, and then developed over the years until it reached a stage where it provides more and more options that it was not able to provide. In the past, the extent of the development of CDN services can be explained by dividing them into 3 successive generations:
- The first generation : This generation was limited to dealing with HTML files and downloadable elements only. Security options were almost non-existent, but they focused on providing the best levels of fast performance for the site. In addition, they were expensive due to their huge cost at the time.
- 2nd Generation : This generation evolved to include static files, dynamic files, multiple media files, etc., and was able to provide performance efficiency options in addition to presence options by reducing the chances of website downtime to a minimum. The service was also somewhat expensive.
- 3rd Generation : The third generation has evolved to provide more options that were not available in previous generations. The service has also become available to all website owners, regardless of their size, and it has even become easy to obtain the service for free from some of its providers. The third generation included dealing with all types of files, as well as dealing with database queries as well. Security options were available that were not available in previous generations. Prices have also decreased significantly and have become available to a larger segment of website owners around the world.
Conclusion
After you learned about the benefits of CDNs and what they can offer to your site to increase its loading speed and efficiency for visitors, you must make a CDN decision quickly if you are one of the owners of dynamic sites and have a base of visitors from different countries around the world. In this case, subscribing to that CDN will be The service is essential for you, in order to help your site load quickly, which further enhances the users’ experience for a better browsing experience
