What is a CDN?
A content delivery network (CDN) accelerates the delivery of your website’s pages, video and other content to its visitors. A CDN is often used for retail and ecommerce websites; Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds; and web-based applications that receive a lot of traffic, offer streaming video and interactive media, or have a far-reaching global audience. A CDN uses a system of distributed servers to rapidly deliver web pages and related media to a website visitor based on the geographic locations of the visitor, the origin of the web page and the CDN’s nearest server. Besides quickly delivering content to a visitor, CDNs also help websites cope with unexpected or large surges in traffic.
The operations of a CDN are nearly invisible to your site’s visitors. A visitor will not know if a CDN has delivered a website’s content unless the delivered URL differs from the requested URL.
Fast-loading web pages are of the utmost importance. Per the report, a one-second delay in the response of a web page can cause a 7 percent reduction in your conversions. In business terms, this means that if an ecommerce site has revenues of $100,000 a day, a one-second delay could potentially result in $2.5 million in lost sales every year.