3 Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Use CDN (content delivery network)
Content Delivery Networks in the past were primarily used by large companies to help speed delivery of images and files.
Don’t know what a Content Delivery Network is (CDN for short)?
Essentially, a CDN is a collection of servers placed in diverse locations around the World. The placement of servers is critical for the effectiveness of the CDN. In addition to server location, the network capacity and speed of the CDN data center is as important. If the data center isn’t properly equipped to handle large amounts of data transmission, CDN speed will be decreased.
The CDN stores images, large files, videos, and audio files. With most CDN providers you need to upload the files and then link to them from your website.
When a visitor hits your website, the CDN decides which location is closest to the site visitor and then sends the files for download from that location. The primary reason to use a CDN is to improve your customers experience and ultimately close a sale or gather a lead.
Customers Hate Slow Websites.
Consider the following statistics that show how site speed impacts your visitors:
- 47% of people want a web page to load in two seconds or less.
- 57% of visitors abandon pages that take 3 seconds or more to load.
- At peak traffic, more than 75% of online consumers left for a competitor’s site rather than suffer delays.
- A site that loads in 3 seconds experiences 22% fewer page views, a 50% higher bounce rate, and a 22% fewer conversions than a site that loads in 1 second. While a site that loads in 5 seconds experiences 35% fewer page views, a 105% higher bounce rate, and 38% fewer conversions.
- 8% of people cite slow loading pages as a key reason for abandoning their purchase.
Slow Site Speed Impact on Conversion.
- Conversion rate increases 74% when load time decreases from 8 to 2 seconds (real-user monitoring data from 33 major retailers)
- Aberdeen Group study showed that a one second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions.
- One guy got an 8.47% conversion rate improvement by moving his landing page onto a faster host.
- Shopzilla sped up their site by 5 seconds and increased the conversion rate 7-12%.
- Shaving 2.2 seconds off Mozilla’s landing pages increased download conversions by 15.4%, which they estimate will result in 60 million more Firefox downloads per year.
- Amazon reported already in 2006 that they got 1% revenue increase for every 100ms of improvement.
Simply put, the closer the servers are to your site visitor, the faster your website loads.
The great thing about CDN’s is that your site visitor won’t even notice what is going on behind the scenes.
Top 3 Reasons to Use a CDN for Your Website
- A Better Customer Experience. Faster loading images means more eyeballs. This means more people engaging with your site content and less clicking away to your competitor.
- An Increase in Conversions. The research above proves that site speed matters in e-commerce.
- Reduction in bandwidth costs. Bandwidth costs can really add up, and it’s best to keep your images within a CDN where bandwidth costs are reduced.
We Recommend LeaseWeb.com.
LeaseWeb Content Delivery Network features:
- An intuitive control panel with real-time monitoring statistics to allow customers to optimize content distribution
- Instant purging of content to ensure continuously accurate data delivery
- Advanced origin protection to shield against DDoS attacks
- Full redundancy and high scalability due to double-deployed infrastructure and Geo-DNS
In addition, LeaseWeb offers two different billing models so you can pick the solution that fits your business needs the best.
LeaseWeb CDN is available in two options, namely Pay-as-you-go and Enterprise. Pay-as-you-go provides flexibility with minimal upfront costs and no long-term commitment. Enterprise offers high-volume customers substantial cost savings over the Pay-as-you-go pricing, as well as options to tailor the platform to meet specific requirements. A 100% uptime SLA is included with both options.
Both solutions support HTTP live streaming (HLS), pseudo-streaming for video on demand, and the most popular codecs, including MP4, H264, Flash video (FLV), and VP8 (WebM). This makes LeaseWeb CDN suitable for the gaming, video streaming, and software distribution industries, amongst others.
For more information on both available solutions visit www.LeaseWeb.com.
Christian Henning