Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are fast gaining momentum among businesses looking to deliver proactive customer experience to their visitors.

It has become even more critical with businesses striving to reach global audiences by offering seamless access to their online services. This increase in demand is mainly driven by CDN’s capability to limit latency, thus, improving website loading speed for augmented performance.

But is a CDN worth it? Does your business really need to invest in a CDN service? Let’s dive into the answer.

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What Is a CDN

A CDN is a network of globally distributed data centres and proxy servers that aims to ensure faster content delivery to website users. It does this by caching and delivering static content by the server spatially relative to end users.

Thus, the distance between the website and the end users reduces significantly, resulting in limited latency, improved webpage loading, and availability leading to improved user experiences. Please note, while most CDNs cache static content, you will have ones that deal with dynamic content as well.

Almost every second site uses CDNs to boost performance for fortified user satisfaction. However, not all websites can get the same benefits from this service. Didn’t get what we mean? Find out whether your business needs a CDN or not in the later portion of the article.

How Does a CDN Work

A CDN caches content and distributes it across its network of edge servers, also known as PoP (Point of Presence), scattered worldwide. The aim is to optimise the routing path to decrease latency and ensure faster content delivery to users.

Now, when an access request for specific content is sent to the CDN, it’s directed to the edge server proximal to the user by the CDN’s intelligent routing system. The edge server then searches for the cached version of the content and sends it back to the requesting user.

Reducing the distance a request travels to deliver content results in decreased latency and accelerated content delivery. Furthermore, CDNs enable effective load balancing to ensure all visiting traffic is distributed among servers evenly. It further helps improve website loading speed and thereby, performance.

The Benefits of a CDN

The global CDN market size was valued at $21.36 B in 2023 and is poised to record a CAGR of 17.7% from 2024 to 2030. The market expansion can be attributed to increased demand for online content, driven by the current boom in streaming services, digital media, and e-commerce platforms. CDNs are fast gaining momentum among businesses due to the benefits they offer:

Turbocharges your Website Reliability and Responsiveness

A high-performance and fast-loading website is no longer considered a nice-to-have thing – it’s a must-have if you want to have your website packed with the hottest leads. This is because high-performance websites are now considered the benchmark for optimal conversion rates as loading time greatly impacts user behaviours. The faster your website loads, the higher will be the conversion rates.

Case in point: For a loading speed increased by one second, the conversion rate improves by 17%. On the other hand, for a delay of even a single second in loading, your website may experience a drop of a staggering 7%.

In a study, Hubspot reported a website with a loading time of 2.4 seconds to experience a conversion rate of 1.9%, whereas, the rate slips to 1.5% for the same page if it takes 3.3 seconds to load. It further slips off and goes well below 1% with loading time reaching 4.2 seconds.

As we know, CDNs play a critical role in fortifying your website performance by minimising latency, thereby improving loading speed – for all customers, regardless of their location or the device they use. All these lead to faster delivery of content upon user request, which ultimately improves your website responsiveness and performance.

Global Reach

With digital services becoming increasingly accessible, people now use the Internet more than ever.

Case in point: As of April 2024, more than 5.44 Billion people use the internet globally, amounting to 67.1% of the total population of the world. Needless to say, this number is only going to skyrocket.

For a business, this increasing number of internet users begets both good and bad. For example, while businesses now get the opportunity to get online traction to a broader audience, the sheer breadth of users can cause strain on traditional server architecture at the seams. This is because long-distance communication and transactions often get plagued by the latency a website experiences while used by a user offshore.

This is where a CDN comes into play. Capitalising on a CDN service means your content gets distributed and cached over a network of PoPs strategically placed worldwide. Thus, it becomes easier for you to serve your users from the server at the most proximity. This results in faster loading times and lessened latency as data no longer need to travel thousands of miles to hit your website’s origin server for content.

Optimal Availability

To keep revenue rolling in your business, ensuring continuous online presence stands as a strategic imperative. However, serving users only with your origin server cannot ensure your website is always up and running due to its susceptibility to outages such as hardware failure, natural disasters, cyber scams, etc.

Whether you rely on a third-party service or an in-house CDN exclusive to your business, a CDN ensures optimal availability, thanks to the advanced edge architecture it leverage. Replicating and caching content across geographically located edge servers allows CDNs to exert failover capabilities and redundancy.

It implies that, even if a server fails due to any unplanned/planned downtime, content can be delivered by the next proximal server. Again, the load balancing technique in CDNs ensures optimal traffic distribution across all edge servers.

Thus, a single CDN server is never overloaded, which can result in downtimes or operational disruptions.

The global coverage and the high-end security measures, such as web application firewalls, DDoS attack mitigation, etc., ensure your website hardly experiences any operational issues that can escalate into downtimes.

Cost Savings

CDN’s caching techniques help businesses slash a significant amount off your bill. With a CDN, your origin server doesn’t need to deliver content every time users request it. Rather, it enables faster content delivery by caching content and sending it to the users.

This way, the trip of data to and from the origin server is reduced significantly, resulting in bandwidth cost savings. This is because web hosting services usually charge websites based on the amount of data that travels to and from their hosting servers. The more data that gets transferred, the greater the cost.

Disadvantages of a CDN

Implementing a CDN needs a hefty amount to be invested, particularly for businesses that experience heavy incoming traffic or have a large volume of content to serve.
Setting up and managing a CDN system is a complex task that needs expert expertise.
At the core of a CDN system is the caching technique that sometimes leads to invalidation issues, especially with websites that deal with dynamic content.
A misconfigured CDN system is vulnerable to security risks that, if exploited by hackers, can result in serious repercussions for businesses.

Does Your business need a CDN

Evaluate if you really need a CDN for your website. If your website fall under any of the following criteria, it can perform well even without a CDN::

Local Audience: If the lion’s share of your audience base is from the same geographical region, CDN’s benefits of reducing latency and improving page loading speed seem limited. In that case, you do not buy a CDN service.
Low Traffic: If your website always experiences low traffic flowing into your website and hardly faces heavy load, you don’t need the optimisation benefits a CDN offers.
Data Privacy and Compliance Concerns: For a business obliged to abide by stringent data privacy and compliance regulations, leveraging a CDN service may seem challenging. The distributed nature of a CDN may raise concerns about data governance, compliance, and security.

Wrapping Up: Is CDN Worth It?

CDNs offer a range of benefits – from augmenting website performance to locking out scammers. But, is a CDN worth it?

In short, yes – if you have a global business packed with heavy traffic or need to boost your online presence, adding a CDN into your digital strategy could be a game-changer.

However, as we have discussed previously, not all businesses need a CDN. To sum up, evaluate your needs, the services available and your budget constraints before you invest in a CDN service.