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Most business website owners would agree that delivering their website content to visitors’ screens quickly is very important, so they use various tips and tricks to speed up their web pages. In the past, a common trick was to serve images from a separate subdomain, such as images.yourdomain.com, because browsers could only open a limited number of connections to each domain. Modern browsers and the HTTP/2 protocol have largely removed that limit, but one technique still makes a big difference: a content delivery network (CDN).
Benefits and Functionality
The main benefit of using a CDN is that your content is served faster, wherever your visitors are. For example, if your server is in your own country and a visitor is on the other side of the world, it takes that visitor’s browser longer to download your pages than it takes a visitor nearby. The delay is caused by the distance and the large number of “hops” needed to deliver the content: the data is routed through many devices on the network before it finally arrives. A CDN, on the other hand, copies your content to data centers around the world and serves each visitor from the closest one, ensuring faster delivery.
Affordable CDNs for Small Business
CDNs are not just for large companies. There are solutions to suit the needs and budgets of smaller businesses too. Many web hosts now include a free CDN with their plans, and Cloudflare offers a popular free plan that you can set up by pointing your domain to it. Another well-known option is Amazon CloudFront, which works together with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): S3 stores your content and CloudFront delivers it quickly to visitors in different locations.
How to Set Up Amazon CloudFront and S3
After signing up for an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, upload your website’s static files, such as images, to an S3 “bucket”. Then create a CloudFront distribution in the AWS console and choose your bucket as its origin. CloudFront can keep the bucket private and fetch the files from it securely. To serve the content from your own subdomain, such as cdn.yourdomain.com, add the subdomain to the distribution along with a free SSL certificate from AWS Certificate Manager, and create a CNAME record in your DNS settings that points the subdomain to your CloudFront address. Your content is now ready to be served from your CDN.
One of the most important qualities of any website is performance. If your web pages take too long to load, visitors will leave, sales will be lost and the whole experience will be unsatisfying. A slow site can also hurt your rankings, because page experience, including speed, is one of the signals Google uses. With a content delivery network, you can offer a fast experience to every visitor, wherever and whenever they visit.