Category: Latency

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CDNs: Content Delivery No-brainers!

With site loading times so critical for conversion of visitors to purchases and its use by Google as a signal in their search rankings, having optimal performance for your site’s users is very important to not just the popularity of your site, but also the success of your business.

CDNs – Who, what, where?

CDNs (or Content Delivery Networks to give them their full name) run multiple servers in multiple geographic locations with plentiful and high quality networking connections and compute resources. These can, depending on the company and their business model, run into the hundreds of thousands of servers, in hundreds of locations, with multiple Terabits (1,000 Gigabits) of connectivity.

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Using HAR and Waterfall graph analysis to improve site load times

2015With site loading times so critical for conversion of visitors to purchases and its use by Google as a signal in their search rankings, understanding the exact performance of your site for users and the reasons for that performance can be very important to not just the popularity of your site, but also the revenue of your business.

If your business involves online retail or eCommerce, then you should be used to investing in areas such as A/B testing to determine what changes improve your conversion rates and you may be aware of the effect of performance on users in general, but from experience the amount of organisations who have a tight focus on performance when building their site is pretty small.

There are many tools that are available to test the performance of your site for users:

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CDN implementation considerations

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are often considered to be a solution to multiple problems, but it is very important to consider the problem(s) that you are looking to solve for when determining whether, when and where to use one.

CDN overview

CDN companies run multiple servers in multiple geographic locations with plentiful and high quality networking connections and compute resources. These can, depending on the company and their business model, run into the hundreds of thousands of servers, in hundreds of locations, with multiple Terabits (1,000 Gigabits) of connectivity. Typically CDNs aim to provide value to their customers in multiple ways, which depending on their feature focus may include a range of:

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