Content Delivery Networks CDN and eCommerce
Why CDN important for eCommerce stores.
Before we start with 'why', we should understand 'what' is CDN, and after that we will cover how CDN is important for our eCommerce stores.CDN stands for Content Delivery Network.
The website you visit on your daily basis most of them are running from a physical location, but data of the site still needs to travel all the way to the user, data like images, videos, files or text data etc.
According to online website traffic calculation
- 25% will likely to leave the website if its loading time is more than 4 secs.
- 74% will leave your site if it is taking 5 secs to load.
- 40% - 45% of the traffic won't return to your website if its performance is poor.
- Maximum 2 secs load time per page is ideal for the traffic to start liking your performance.
But don't worry CDN is here to solve the problem.
Let's start with the basic information of CDN.
CDN is the way by which you can deliver the content of your site to your users more efficiently and more quickly. CDN consist of a network having different servers all over the world, these server are called POP('point of presence').
Edge server is the server installed to the nearest area of the user. when that user request the data from the website it is served with CDN, they get connected to the edge server to get the best online experience and site speed.
Content can be stored in the cache of the CDN to minimize the response time of the server. CDN purge (remove and update) the content from the server to server the user with the latest information present at the time. So when a user request some data or in other words browse your website it is basically connected and getting the data from the nearby POP and getting the fastest response possible.
Some of the benefits we are getting by using CDN includes:
- Fast load time of content for web and mobile users.
- Easily and quickly scalable during heavy traffic.
- Ensuring site stability, minimizing risk of losing users due to bad performance.
- Save the traffic bandwidth on our server when content is served via pop.
- Increases the site performance
Now if we talk about eCommerce websites we can see these sites are amongst the heavy site categories. A traditional Ecommerce website consist of hundreds of pages and multiple of hundreds of images into a single store.
At the time of heavy traffic it is very hard for an eCommerce to maintain their site performance when there are thousand of people requesting data from the server at the same time.Now for example the users are from different country or different location and they visit the site, there is huge amount of traffic and data request for a single server to resists.
Some time the server just went down after having huge amount of traffic at the same time.
This is where CDN comes in handy. Now when using CDN all the users from different countries or locations get the content from the server closest to them, instead from main single data server. Because of this the site will open to the users browsers more quickly, their performance will be increased, SEO of the site will also increase and your user don't need to go anywhere else shopping :)
