What exactly is a CDN, and could it be used to improve your business search engine optimisation?

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Date: 06/12/2023

You might’ve heard your SEO company talk about the many advantages of having a content delivery network, also often called CDN. You might also wonder what this is and the main benefits of purchasing a CDN.

A CDN is simply a network of servers located in many different countries across the globe, and what they do is allow your company website to be served much faster to a shopper and more reliably from servers situated closer to where the shoppers are.

So, for example, let’s say somebody is shopping for a nice suit; it will be better to visit that website using a server in Amsterdam if the shopper is based in the U.K rather than the website coming from a server in America.
So the main benefit is speed; the website loads faster for the shopper, allowing FCP, or First Contentful Paint, and therefore offers a better user experience (U.X) because someday may want to look at, say, 17 different items before they make a purchase. If the e-commerce website is slow, then they’re likely to get frustrated- the shopper is likely to buy there suit from elsewhere. They could even leave the website and visit a competitor’s website- causing the business to have a higher bounce rate.

So having a quality CDN, where the businesses website is much faster, can lead to a better user experience and potentially lower your business bounce rate.

So, how exactly does a CDN work?

What you want is to purchase a high-quality CDN; these companies should have different servers based in multiple locations worldwide.

The primary purpose of purchasing a CDN is simply that the hosting company which owns the servers will have a server-based closer to the shopper is.

So, if somebody is shopping for an item in the United Kingdom, it could be possible that there is a server in Birmingham; therefore, positioning the servers much closer to the shopper allows the website to load much more quickly and therefore, this could help a business to reduce its bounce rate.

Improved page loading times

Let’s say peak times when people are coming home from work, say at 5:30 or 7:30 in the evening- this is lilkely when a lot of people will be purchasing items here in Britain.

The person might be packed into a train, shopping for items on their iPhone and are simply looking to buy a rather generic item such as a duvet set for their home.

However, if the website they are on is extremely slow and are likely to leave that website and visit a competitor’s site- causing the business to have a high bounce rate.

So, by purchasing a quality CDN, this allows your company website to load much faster because the website is coming from a server closer to where the shopper is.

For example, you could have a server in the United Kingdom rather than just hiring a hosting company based in America. Therefore, the website will likely load faster if your shopper is here and your hosting companies server is within the same country.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

This is a free tool; we would recommend using it to see if you can make your website faster.

Which companies offer CDN services?

A famous company is called Cloudflare, this company uses something called Smart Routing to ensure that your website is delivered to the shopper quickly.

There’s also Amazon Web services

This is another famous company used for CDN services; Amazon Web services can also be easily integrated into your WordPress content management system, and we would recommend this company also.