Why Do You Need a CDN for Your WordPress Blog? [Infographic]

Are you wondering what’s a CDN or ‘content delivery network’, and why is it important for your website?

If you’re looking to speed up your WordPress site, then a CDN is an extremely valuable tool to have. It quickly delivers content to the end user in different locations and improves the user experience.

In this article, we will show you why you need a CDN for your WordPress blog.

Infographic

To find out what is a CDN, simply click to view the infographic. You can also continue reading our article for written details.

Note: Just to clarify, CDN is something you use on top of having a web hosting account because it helps speed up things.

CDN does not replace a web hosting account, as you still need to have a hosting provider like SiteGround or Bluehost.

What is a CDN?

CDN is short for Content Delivery Network, which is a network of servers that deliver cached static content from websites to users based on the user’s geographic location.

If this sounds overwhelming, then let’s break it down in simpler words.

How Does a CDN Work?

Normally, when a user comes to your WordPress blog, their browser downloads the website from your web host’s server (i.e. HostGator). Your web host’s server is located at a physical location, for example, Houston, Texas.

What this means is that every user is accessing this one server in Texas to view your WordPress website. Now, if you have a high volume of traffic, then you can overload your server, which leads to a slow loading site or even server crash.

This is where a CDN comes in handy. A CDN is a network of servers that are spread throughout the world. When you use a CDN, your static content is cached and stored on all of these servers.

Static content includes images, stylesheets (CSS files), javascript, and more. When a user visits your website, the CDN technology redirects them to the closest server to their location.

For example, if your main server is hosted in Houston, TX, and someone from Durham, England tries to access it, then they will be redirected to the closest server, which may be in London.

This limits the number of internet hops needed to transmit the static files to your end-user. Because the user’s computer is closer in location to the CDN server, the files will load faster.

By having your content available on multiple servers around the world, you can make your pages load faster from the user’s perspective. In simple words, the closer the CDN server is to where your user is, the faster the user gets the content.

Now, you may be wondering if a CDN is worth it on your website? Let’s look at why you need it for your WordPress blog.

Why Do You Need a CDN for Your WordPress Blog?

Having a CDN can impact your website’s performance and boost the user experience. Below are some of the advantages of using a CDN:

• Speed – A CDN helps improve the page load time of your site and makes it faster.
• Crash Resistance – Using a CDN allows you to distribute the load to multiple servers instead of having 100% traffic to our main server, thus making it less likely to crash.
• Improved User Experience – With a CDN making your website faster, you’ll noticed a decline in bounce rate on your site. It also increases the numbers of pages viewed by each user. Clearly, a fast site means improved user experience.
• Improvement in SEO – Google has stated that faster sites tend to rank higher in search engines. A CDN can boost your WordPress SEO and help you achieve higher keyword rankings.

Which is the Best CDN for WordPress?

There are many WordPress CDN services in the market. We recommend Buddy.net as the best CDN provider that you use for your WordPress website. It has servers spread across the world and offers affordable pricing plans.

If you’re looking for a CDN service that also provides security features, then we suggest using Sucuri. It offers a powerful WordPress firewall and CDN to protect your site from different threats while ensuring fast load times. We use Sucuri on WPBeginner as a CDN and website security plugin.

An alternate solution to Sucuri us StackPath. MaxCDN is also now part of StackPath. The CDN offes a large network of servers and secures your site from DDoS attacks.

We hope that this article helped you learn why you need a CDN for your WordPress blog. You may also want to look at our guide on the best WordPress plugins for business sites and how to get a free SSL certificate for your WordPress website.

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