Synthetic Monitoring
A Content Delivery Network is a geographically spread-out network of servers configured to decrease the amount of time it takes for visitors to load a website. Using a CDN can make a huge difference for businesses looking to give their website an edge over the competition by creating a smoother user experience. Additionally, CDNs can help websites manage traffic growth and surges to prevent the site from being a victim of its own popularity. Let’s go over why your business needs a CDN.
Geographical Speed
CDNs boost speed by creating “mirror” versions of your content in multiple geographical locations which allow visitors to access the closest node. This reduces the amount of time it takes data to move between the visitor and the server, thus making the interaction experience faster. The farther away someone is from the server, the longer it takes, so using a CDN can shave a second or two off of load times fairly easily. The node stores copies of frequently accessed content so that much of the page’s data takes a much shorter trip.
A visitor in New York City may be loading your site’s pages in a second, whereas a visitor in Los Angeles may take four seconds to load the same content. Apica hosts 2,600 monitoring nodes across 83 countries which help businesses determine weaker served areas in their chosen CDN.
CDNs Help Retain Visitors through Faster Performance
The longer a page takes to load, the less likely the website will complete a conversion. According to LoadStorm, one in four people will abandon a page if it passes through the four-second threshold when loading. Trimming a second or two from the load time can make all the difference with a CDN because better programming and more powerful hosting servers can’t help improve performance when the distance is the issue.
Your Business Needs a CDN to give you a Competitive Edge
As of 2016, only around half of the top 10,000 websites on the Internet were using CDN services to deliver their content. Therefore, utilizing a CDN can help your website have a performance edge over your competitors. People are more likely to use a faster-loading site than a notoriously slow one. CDNs help mitigate traffic surges, which plays an important role in keeping your company’s website online if it suddenly gets very popular.
The Hosting and Database Infrastructure is Still Important
CDNs focus on hosting frequently used, rarely-changed files like images, CSS, JavaScript, and video clips; however, dynamic content like HTML page generation, comments, shopping carts, and payment platforms still run through the main server. Therefore the CDN itself is only part of the equation: your application and database servers still need to be able to scale to match the demand.
Services like load testing play a major role in not only determining how much traffic your infrastructure can handle but also establishing the most economical ways to expand it to meet demand. As an added bonus, CDNs can also help mitigate DDoS attacks on your website, as the CDN servers are designed to handle massive amounts of traffic.
If your business is looking at improving its performance through a CDN or just trying to see if your current CDN is keeping up with demand, the experts at Apica can help with website monitoring services. Contact us today!