User experience is a key point when it comes to SEO optimization. Talking about user experience, your load time performance plays a huge role in offering the best journey on your website. In fact, Google considers load time as a ranking factor. Content Delivery Networks can really help improving your page speed. However, a lot of people are not comfortable with that notion and how it can boost your page speed.
What is a Content Delivery Network and how does it work?
CDNs are a system of servers, refered to as POPs (points of presence), based all around the world and delivering web pages depending on where the user is based. CDNs then will faster distribute your website content if you are located in France and if the user accessing your content is located in Bordeaux, compare to someone based in New York. So the furthest away the visitor accessing the content is, the longer the load time will be.
CDNs thus offers great opportunity to quickly share your content to a wider audience in just a few seconds. Actually, a CDN allows you to cache your website content to deliver it from an edge server to the user faster. So any companies should be aware of its potential and especially when it comes to SEO.
Using a CDN will:
- Improve the load time of your content
- Reduce the open connections to your web server
- Increase user experience and site performances
- Lower image size sent to the user
- Minimize traffic spikes at point of origin to save your website stability
- Help scale in case of high traffic
What is the impact of CDNs on your SEO?
CDN improves your page speed and the quality of the content sent to the user. While CDN can really help in optimizing your load time distribution, it must be regarded as a partner of your existing load time strategy. You cannot just rely on CDNs.
Using CDNs can help you:
- Determine whether each version of your website across several servers and places are the same
- Fight duplicate content issues by using caching algorithms and canonical headers
- Deliver the most recent and relevant content
- Lower your load time
- Lower risk of attacks and crashing on your website thanks to the different servers located in different locations
To sum up, CDNs can benefit anyone with a website visited by multiple users at a time and from different locations and that have a lot of different types of content. Above all, CDNs will improve your load speed and thus your rankings. But be careful when setting up your CDN: do it wisely or ask a professional. If done in the wrong way, it will damage your SEO and user experience.
