CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is a network of geographically distributed servers that delivers web content to users from the server closest to them, reducing load times and improving reliability.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of servers spread across multiple locations worldwide. When someone visits your website, instead of every request going to a single origin server (which might be thousands of miles away), the CDN serves content from the nearest "edge" server, dramatically reducing the distance data travels.
When a user in Tokyo visits your US-hosted website, the CDN serves images from a server in Japan instead of sending them across the Pacific Ocean. This can reduce load times from seconds to milliseconds. Modern CDNs do much more than just cache static files.
In practice
- An Australian e-commerce site serving mainly US customers reduced their average page load time from 4.2 seconds to 1.1 seconds by implementing Cloudflare as their CDN
- A media company's site survived a traffic spike of 10x normal volume during a breaking news event because their CDN handled the load, while their origin server would have crashed
- A SaaS company serving customers globally saw a 60% improvement in page speed for users in Asia and Europe after deploying their assets to a CDN
- A video streaming platform uses a CDN to deliver content from 200+ edge locations, ensuring smooth playback regardless of the viewer's location
Not sure how this applies to you?
A senior engineer walks your site, your search presence and the way enquiries reach you, then writes down the three things worth fixing first. You keep the document either way.