Traffic And CDN – Here’s How They Are Interconnected

The internet has turned the world into our private backyard. Accessing content from the other side of the planet is, very simply, a series of clicks away. In reality, if a website’s servers are based in Florida, users who are far should technically be experiencing slower content delivery, solely because of the distance between the servers and user. Such scenarios can create multiple inconsistencies in the user experience and can limit content providers from achieving reach. However, this isn’t the case, only because of CDNs or Content Delivery Networks working 24×7 in the background.

The sole purpose of a CDN is to deliver content from a website to users across geographies in a quick, reliable, and secure way. By reducing the distance between content and consumers, CDNs help platforms and publishers provide faster performance, reduced loading time, and greater control over bandwidth consumption and costs. Today, more than half of the world’s online traffic is served via content delivery networks, and this stat only continues to grow as businesses expand their global reach and offerings.

Below are six ways that showcase how CDNs can influence and optimize traffic on the web.

Better connectivity and reduced bandwidth consumption

A CDN provides consumers with faster content load times. A clear advantage for users, for publishers this translates to more page views, traffic spikes, improved customer engagement and lower drop off rates. Also, by storing copies of the content closer to the users, a CDN means fewer data transfers from the origin server, reducing bandwidth consumption and costs.

Reduced latency

Latency refers to the delay between the time data is requested to when the system starts responding to the request. As CDNs store web content caches closer to users, they reduce latency and improve performance.

Better response to traffic spikes

Events like a successful campaign, a video gone viral or limited time offers and discounts can create a sudden increase in content demand. CDNs use effective load balancing to distribute this demand across servers to prevent overloading any single server, which helps monitor the surge in demand that can hinder website performance.

Improved security

Content delivery networks use analytics and automation tools that can counter DDoS attacks, firewall breaches and other unexpected attacks, ensuring the safety and health of websites.

Greater user satisfaction

Unending load times are one of the biggest reasons why users drop off and/or avoid websites. With a CDN in place, you can prevent or reduce these performance issues, making it more likely that users will be satisfied with their interactions.

Improved content delivery

Not only do CDNs deliver content faster, but they also improve the quality of the content delivered. Heavy formats like live videos can jitter because of slow transmission, affecting the audio and video delivery. By shortening the distance between the content and the user, CDNs prevent these issues and ensure no single server is overloaded with traffic requests.

As our world keeps getting more digital by the day, CDNs help bridge the gap between distance and consumption, helping businesses achieve a global presence. From e-commerce to games, potentially any data that can be digitized can witness potentially unlimited reach only because of the power of CDNs.

To take a look at how we’ve integrated CDNs to optimize some of the biggest businesses across the world, take a look at our case studies here.