You’ve worked incredibly hard to create the perfect website to promote your Irish business and sell your products online.
Your website is on-brand, contains informative and fun blog posts, and allows your target market to learn more about your company and what you have to offer.
But many people become so focused on excellent design and engaging content when creating a website, that the end up overlooking one of the most important things of all.
When was the last time you evaluated your website’s performance and speed?
A CDN is exactly what you need to ensure things are running smoothly.
Read on to learn what they are and why you need one for your website.
First of all, let’s make sure you understand what a content delivery network, or CDN for short, actually is.
In short, a CDN is a network of servers in different locations all across the globe. All the servers keep your website up and running. However, because people access your website from all around the world, they’ll have closer proximity to your servers.
This means the website will load quickly no matter where someone is accessing it from.
In addition to helping to improve your website performance, CDN services also help to guard against potential security threats. They are especially effective in stopping DDOS attacks.
This is because with multiple servers, it’s much more difficult for hackers to successfully drive your site offline.
Many people believe that a CDN is the same thing as a web hosting platform, but there are a few major differences between the two.
First of all, web hosting in many cases refers to a singular server, whereas a CDN is a network of many servers in lots of different geographic locations.
Additionally, web hosting is all about getting your website online and available for visitors to access. CDN services, on the other hand, are all about optimizing and improving access and uptime of an already existing website.
Finally, when you’re using web hosting services alone, the overall speed of content delivery depends on the geographic location of the server. If your main host server is located in Ireland, but someone in the United States visits your site, they’ll, of course, be a bit farther from the server than Irish visitors.
This means that the American visitors will likely need to wait a bit for the host server to retrieve and send the website data to them. This often leads to a bit of a lag.
It may not be much time, but keep in mind that even if your website takes as little as three seconds to load completely, visitors will navigate away from it.
A content delivery network, however, means that visitors from outside of Ireland will have servers closer to their exact location. This means faster loading times and an improved experience overall.
Now that you know more about what a CBN is and how it’s different than a standard web hosting platform, let’s discuss some of the biggest benefits it offers.
First of all, you’ll get 100% uptime for your website when you use a CDN. This is because even if a power failure or another problem occurs in one region where a server is located, you’ll have many other servers to pull from.
When your website is online, you’ll be able to make sales, book appointments, and increase your standing in search engine rankings.
You’ll also save lots of money because you’re not paying for lots of different international hosting servers from many different companies. It also helps you to keep things much more organized. Especially if you’re looking for ways to lower the costs of running your website, a CDN is an excellent solution.
Plus, CDNs will help you to learn more about your customer base by providing you with invaluable analytical data.
You’ll learn who is visiting your website when, where they’re located, your website’s most and least popular pages, and much more. This helps you to better optimize your content for your market. Of course, you’ll also be able to expand to a more global market.
Finally, using a content delivery network will allow more people to access your website at the same time. As online shopping only becomes more and more popular in Ireland and beyond, chances are that you get a high level of web traffic already.
But if you have a post that goes viral, or release a new product? You don’t want your website to go offline because of a surge in traffic. A CDN helps to make certain that doesn’t happen.
We hope that this post has helped you to understand not only what a CDN is, but also why it’s so important that you have one.
A CDN doesn’t just improve the visitor experience. It helps you to learn about who visits your website so that you can improve it even further, and opens you up to new markets.
Looking to learn more about how you can improve your website’s performance? Want to understand how to calculate how much bandwidth you need?
Do you just want to work with a web hosting platform and CDN provider that makes you feel like a priority?
We’re here to help make it happen.
Reach out to us today to learn more about how to ensure that your website loads quickly, meets the demands of your visitors, and helps to grow your business as a whole.
