Decrease your Bounce Rate and Increase your SEO with a CDN
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Two goals that all web site owners share are keeping visitors on their sites longer and ranking higer in organic search results, and there is an easy and low-cost way that can help achieve these goals: a content delivery network (CDN). What is a CDN? In short, a CDN is a network of servers that each hold copies of select files from your website; when a user visits your site, the CDN detects the approximate location of the user, and loads the files from the server nearest to their location. Not surprisingly, servers closer to you geographically tend to communicate faster with you than servers which are far away. For a great demonstration of this, go to speedtest.net and try the test with a few servers in your area, then with a few servers on the other side of the world; you will notice quite a difference.
It stands to reason that the web users will spend more time on websites which load quickly than they will on slow websites. As internet connections have become faster, the average web user’s patience for slow sites has decreased dramatically. We can all think of times when a site performed so poorly that we because frustrated and left. A CDN helps your site to load quickly, regardless of the geographic location of the user, providing a universally better experience.
What does this have to do with SEO, though? Since 2009, Google has considered site speed as a ranking factor on organic search results. The good news is, a CDN can dramatically speed up your site with very little money or effort on your part. One of the most popular CDNs, Amazon CloudFront, usually costs just 12 cents per gigabyte of data transferred each month (the price varies based on location as well as amount of data - click the link for full pricing details). Extensions which automatically integrate a CDN into your website are available free of charge for most major content management systems.
So which types of files are distributed by the CDN, and which types continue to be distributed by your web server? Essentially everything with the exception of the actual text content can be served up to your users via CDN. This includes images, CSS files, Javascripts, PDFs, etc. These files generally make up the vast majority of a website’s total filesize, which is why using a CDN is so effective in speeding up your website. These files are, as a whole, less likely to change often, compared to the text on your site; this allows the CDN to use caching to speed up loading time even further. At an interval which you specify (this could be minutes, hours, days, even weeks), the CDN checks with your web server to make sure your site files haven’t been modified; if a modification is found, the new version is copied to the CDN, overwriting the old version of the file.
If you are interesting in incorporating CDN technology into your website, contact Regal Creative. We can provide a cost-effective solution to give your site a dramatic speed boost, making your site more appealing to users, and maybe even to Google.