blog posts

The Content Delivery Network, or CDN for short, is a set of Edge Servers, or POPSs, designed to increase the loading speed and bandwidth of websites based on strategy. Special events have been held in different parts of the world.

Using a CDN, in addition to the security benefits and savings in host resources, is also effective in SEO. In fact, websites that use CDNs load faster than other websites. And since even milliseconds are important to Google and ranking results, such sites grow rapidly in multi-step results. And their incoming traffic increases.

What is a Content Delivery Network or CDN?

As mentioned, a content distribution network, also known as a content delivery network, is a set of edge servers set up according to specific parameters around the globe. The purpose of creating these databases is to deliver digital content to Internet users as soon as possible. So that as soon as the user requests, he is redirected to the nearest CDN server (spatially). And this is due to the slow and delayed loading Prevents pages.

In other words, the main purpose of the CDN service is to maintain and cache a copy of your site assets such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. With the first click of the user, these assets from the nearest database Content delivery network servers will be displayed to him. In other words, to use the content of advanced sites equipped with CDN, the user, wherever he is in the world, will not feel any slowdown in the loading of the pages of that site.

CDN architecture

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) consists of two general elements at its core: the Point of Presence or POP and Edge Servers.

Point of Presence (POP):

The point of presence, usually abbreviated POP, is a specific geographical location where a set of edge servers are set up. Also, the sum of all the points in the whole world that actually form a network are called POPs or points of presence. It is interesting to note that the number and location of POPs that make up a content delivery network has a significant impact on the full and global coverage of that CDN.

Edge Servers:

Edge servers are actually located in the middle of the network, meaning that they are installed in presence points (POPs). These servers are actually proxy caches that function similarly to web browser caches. Instead of re-creating the assets and content of the website, they keep a copy of its cache to show to the user at the request of the user. Each server embedded in the presence point operates for a specific CDN.

The distribution of presence points is different for each CDN, so that some owners of this service want more space with low-capacity servers, while others prefer high-capacity servers with low numbers. Therefore, to analyze the performance of CDNs, we must know the location or point of presence (POPs) of the server itself and the geographical area of ​​its users.

How CDNs work

As you can see, the content production network is a huge collection of servers scattered around the globe, the goal of which is to direct the user to the nearest base or point of presence. In other words, when a user requests to view content from your site, they will be directed to the nearest server base in the blink of an eye. There are many ways to direct a user to a specific point of presence (POP), one of which is the IP Anycast method.

If a website is not with a content distribution system. All the assets of the site, regardless of the location of the user, will go to him from a specific location. In fact, it does not matter if he is in Australia, South Africa, all the content of the site is going him from a specific point, which slows down the loading process.

Content types of CDNs

After examining the general use of the global Internet by the world’s population, it was that most of the information that users consume through bandwidth are photos, videos and audio files, respectively, and the good news is that CDNs support a variety of content formats and formats. And you can use them to display any content to the user:

• Photo: PNG, JPG, SVG, GIF and TIF
• Video: FLV, HSL, MP4, MOV and WMV
• Audio: MP3, WAV, AIFF, AAC and PCM
• Other: CSS, JS, JSON, HTML, PDF, ZIP, TTF, OTF and WOFF

Advantages of using a CDN

Better performance :

Because a copy of site content is on edge-to-edge servers (POPs), sites actually get closer to users around the world, reducing the distance between sending requests and receiving information. The result is a reduction in wasted time and money on the Internet. According to experiments conducted in different parts of the world, the latency on a site equipped with a content delivery network is 73% less than normal sites.

Strengthen credit:

In the process of sending content cache from the edge server database to the user, if one of the servers is not available, the next server automatically registers the user’s request and with a redundancy feature makes the content always available and always available. Becomes. Without this redundancy, the user will encounter an error on the page and will naturally leave the site immediately.

Headache scale:

Uploading traffic to a content distribution network makes managing, scaling, and scaling down data very easy, and since 80% of a website is a static content, a huge amount of your site’s assets through The CDN reaches the user faster. In addition, your costs are due to less use of hosting volumes.

Security guarantee:

Since your site content is streaming through the CDN network and the source servers are somewhat idle, all DDoS attacks, you can track using the content delivery network. Also, all incoming and outgoing traffic is using TLS certificates. (Some CDNs have security features such as Hotlink, Secure Tokens, and others to combat intrusion).

The impact of CDN on SEO

One of the most important benefits of content delivery services is the positive impact on search engine rankings or SEO, which we will examine in the following.

High speed is one of the factors improving SEO:

High page loading speed is a very important factor in ranking websites in Google. Because Google seeks to satisfy its users and an important part of this satisfaction goes back to the site loading speed. Therefore, the less time your site pages are for the user (especially on mobile), the more chances they will have to climb in the results and reach the top of the results.

Of course, keep in mind that despite all these features, if your site content contains render-blocking scripts such as JavaScript or CSS code, the content delivery network will not be able to refine and copy them. So you have to control this issue on your site.

HTTPS is one of the effective factors in SEO:

Another very important factor for Google is the security of websites and their use of SSL certificate. Even if your website is not HTTPS on, you can use the service through CDNs. CDNs usually give you a free SSL certificate. You can easily enable this certificate for your domain and subdomains with one click. After enabling SSL, you must also redirect from HTTP to HTTPS to open all your HTTPS addresses in the browser.

Better listings of images on search engine results page:

Using a content delivery network will make your site page images appear better on Google. Although this is not very professionally. But according to expert research, about 63% of clicks on the results of the Google images section, will eventually lead to entering the site and increase its traffic.

In fact, with CDNs, you can be sure that the images on your web pages will be in a very regular manner, and Google will crawl into them from time to time using its crawlers, which is why Google is eager your site and as a result SEO and its ranking in this search engine.

Conclusion

As you can see, users’ expectations of web pages on the Internet are very high. So that the slowness and delay of 1 or 2 seconds in loading the website causes them discouragement and dissatisfaction. To create trust and satisfaction in users, it is necessary to use all the facilities to optimize your pages. One of which is the content delivery network or CDN. The largest companies and startups in the world use CDN. So if you want to have a say in your field and compete with competitors, you must put the use of content distribution network on your agenda.