Today, the faster load time of web content is a vital necessity to attain visitor satisfaction with a lower bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave the website after the first web page impression). On the other hand, Google has declared the load speed of a webpage as a ranking factor for their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithm by defining the recommended load time as 3 seconds to reach top rankings on Google indexes. However, the static content pieces of web pages which are significantly larger in size, such as images, audios, videos, CSS and JavaScripts, etc. have made the achievement of faster load time, a more complex matter.
According to the insights revealed by a famous Swedish web analytical service named Pingdom, in order to achieve a lower bounce rate, the web services should maintain a web page load time, at least less than 3 seconds.
A foremost cause for the lower load time of web content is the geographical distance between the server and visitor that significantly affects the web load time that contains larger static content. Simultaneously, this very own issue of server-visitor distance causes higher bandwidth cost and network traffic overhead to the web server end when the entire content delivery is handled by a single origin server.
Moreover, a case study by HubSpot reveals that if a website makes $100,000 as of its revenue per day, a 1 second web page speed improvement may be able to cause a revenue growth of $7,000 daily.
Content Delivery Networking (CDN) is a solution to reduce the lagging of web content delivery which is caused by the geographical distance between the server and visitor. The role of a CDN is to cache the content of the origin web server across a globally located caching server network and serve the cached content to the visitor from the geographically closest server location. The performance of a CDN is majorly depending on the number of CDN Points of Presence (PoPs) and the caching mechanism. Sometimes CDNs maintain CDN PoPs that do not serve any traffic as a result of regional uninterestingness for a particular web service. This issue reveals the necessity of intelligent caching based on end-user (visitor) traffic statistics for CDNs to become a cost-effective and efficient solution for CDN customers as well as the CDN service providers.
There are many CDN service providers who are operating in the modern IT marketplace, such as Stackpath CDN, Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, KeyCDN, and BunnyCDN, BlazingCDN, etc. However, there is another option for medium to large-scale enterprises. That is Building their own CDN. Even Though it sounds like a huge work, there are tools like Varnish DIY CDN that can be used to spin up a private CDN by spending a couple of hours.
If you like to know about the concepts behind Content Delivery Networks, you can find more about CDNs by referring our introductory level book about Content Delivery Networking.