What is a CDN and how to set it up
Website loading speed affects its positions in the list of searching results and influences users' behavior which is also important for ranking and conversion rates. Let's talk about page files loading speed and the CDN — one of the effective ways of the site optimization.
What is a CDN?

What is a CDN for?
The longer images, text, files and other page elements load, the less interest and patience users have. That's why the content loading speed is the most influential factor which positively affects users behavior and the site's reputation in general.
The important role is played by a distance between a server and the user. The longer it is, the more time will be spent until all the data appears on the screen. CDN helps to use and connect several servers which are located to the users as closely as it is possible. This cuts waiting time helps to speed up the page loading for all the users regardless of their locations.
What sites need CDN?
Furthermore, for multilingual sites using CDN is strongly advised. Content of such sites is usually translated into at least two languages. Consequently, the server has to load at least two times more info. Users of such sites are scattered worldwide, and most of them are located quite far from the main server.
Due to the CDN, we can create a whole chain of additional servers which are located as close as it is possible to every user which provides more sustainable and quick data delivery and makes the resource accessible for a greater amount of users.
CDN advantages
On this basis, the site is considered to be useful for visitors or not. The faster the content loads, the less chance the user will leave the resource. Moreover, search engines estimate the general site's speed themselves.
Besides increasing the files loading speed, the content delivery network also has other advantages:
How to choose the CDN provider
The best is that provider, servers of which are located most closely to the target audience. And the more servers, the better. Provided that, you can choose the amount and location of the optimal server.
- caching of the whole content. This is the most expensive option, as the fast loading is provided even at the first visit. As we never know what exactly pages will be visited, the site is cached entirely beforehand.
- the first visit caching. This is the most widespread option. User's device saves visited pages only. Usually, the first entering a certain page is the slowest. While all the further visits, the files will be loaded times faster.
Find out how the traffic will be provided if one of the servers crashes. Will be the price changed for a period of the server recovery? Are there any compensations or discounts for the audience loss which happened because of the provider? Also, it worth discussing sanctions applied for both sides in case of non-compliance.
All these nuances have to be taken into account before paying. Moreover, it would be great to know whether the company signs contracts with clients and what are the terms of termination in case if you, for instance, decided to change the provider.
The most popular providers
How to set up CDN?
Let's have a look at several popular CDN providers.
CDN77
Price for the CDN depends on terabytes needed. There are four monthly plans starting from 6 TB and ending with 100 TB per month. Also, there is another pricing type which considers payments for the amount of the used traffic and severs chosen.

CloudFlare
There are four pricing plans on the site. Furthermore, one of them is free. It is suitable for little websites, blogs, etc. The minimum domain service price is 20 USD per month. In addition, the company offers plenty of other useful tools for site optimization and protection.

CDNsun

How to set up CDN?




How to speed up certain files loading?
Content delivery networks work automatically, so entering the address of an existing server in settings is pretty enough to connect the site.
To connect the CDN to some particular page elements, you have to encode new static elements' addresses (images, javascript, etc.). To do this, you need to replace the current files path with the one connected to the CDN.
For example, here is a certain file code:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://user123.clients-cdnnow.ru/css/style.css"/>
https://user123.clients-cdnnow.ru/<uri_path>
//user123.clients-cdnnow.ru/<uri_path>
If you see that after the refreshing, site works incorrectly, e.g. images don't appear or something like that, most probably you have mistaken while encoding. This may be an odd dot, gap or vice versa their absence. Check the code and correct the mistake.
Conclusion
Don't expect that after the CDN is integrated, the site loading will become 2-3 times faster. Everything depends on the size of the loading files, quality of the CDN's work in general, etc.
Increasing loading speed for 1-2 second is a great result. Sometimes, it happens that a 0.5-second difference positively influences customers behavior and their attitude to the content.
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