Why you need (CDN) Content Delivery Network for your site

[Cedric]

A CDN is a network of servers that are distributed across the world, with the aim of delivering content faster and more efficiently to users. CDN providers can cache your website's static content, like images, CSS, and JavaScript files, and serve them from the server that's closest to the user's location.

So, why is CDN important for webmasters? First and foremost, it can significantly improve your website's loading speed. By serving content from a server that's closer to the user, you can reduce the latency and make sure that your website loads quickly, even for users who are far away from your server's location. This can improve your user experience, reduce bounce rates, and ultimately improve your website's rankings on search engines.

Another benefit of CDN is that it can reduce your server load and bandwidth usage. When users request content from your website, the CDN provider can serve it from their server instead of your own server. This means that your server won't have to handle as many requests and can focus on delivering dynamic content, like HTML pages and database queries.

Finally, CDN can also provide additional security benefits. Some CDN providers offer DDoS protection, which can help protect your website from malicious traffic and keep it online during traffic spikes.

So, have you ever used CDN for your website? What has your experience been like? Did you see a significant improvement in your website's loading speed? What CDN provider would you recommend to others?

Let's start a discussion about CDN and share our thoughts and experiences.

 

[Arantor]

I put all my sites behind CloudFlare. This improves the situation for my site's speed, reduces me having to worry about someone throwing masses of nonsense traffic at me in a DDOS format, and can also do things like optimise images (convert to WebP) so I don't have to worry about it (even if in practice I do that myself)

At work I even get CloudFlare caching page content for pages that don't change much, and only need to dump that cache if the page changes; this is relatively easy to get set up on the hosting environments I use where it's already fairly tightly integrated in WordPress, so that updating a page automatically flushes the WP-Rocket/Breeze and CloudFlare caches for that page.

The headache is when the caches keep old content, especially older versions of CSS and JS, but there are strategies for this.

 

[Cory]

I don't think I've ever used a CDN, I've tended to upload all files to my own board server so everything loads with the board as long as the board is online.

However, I upgraded the jQuery version of my board from 1.7.2 to 3.6.3 by using the official site's external file. 1.7.2 is the default jQuery version for Jcink.