The Internet has given businesses a completely new way to interact with their customers. It helps businesses contact and reach a global audience directly. One of the best ways businesses can utilize the Internet is through a business website.
A business website provides you and your users a dedicated domain to interact with each other. Websites have long been an important part of the Internet. Even today, a business without a website rarely succeeds over the Internet.
With how far Internet technology has come, making a website for your business is easy enough. There are many website-building software that can help you create your own website in a few easy steps. However, creating a website isn’t enough.
A business website needs to be crawled by search engines and needs to rank on Google. In this article, we’ll talk about how page speeds affect your ranking and how a content delivery network is the best way to increase your website rankings and webpage speeds.
Ranking on Search Engines
Search engines utilize algorithms known as crawlers that read and review websites and webpages around the internet and create databases that store these web pages and websites. Only websites and web pages that have been crawled can be found by users using a search engine.
Search engines such as Google and Bing are the most popular with users. 90-95% of your customers or potential customers will use these search engines to find your business online. If your website does not rank when users search for it, people won’t be able to find it.
This is where SEO comes in. Website SEO helps ensure that your websites get crawled and rank. However, simple SEO isn’t enough. The deal is that your competitors will also have websites and will try to use SEO to rank higher than you.
According to Google, users are most likely to click on the first three results of a search engine. For example, You have a plumbing business. Suppose a person searches for ‘plumbers near me’.
SEO helps you ensure that you rank when such a term is searched by someone in your geographical area. One of the ways you can increase your website ranking is by increasing page speed.
What is Page Speed?
Page speed is the time it takes your webpage to load. Every webpage has a certain size. Whenever a user clicks on a link to your webpages, their DNS server needs to find your page, ‘call’ it, and then open it on the user’s browser.
This usually happens within a second. A good web page must load in 1-1.5 seconds. There are various ways to increase the page speed of your website pages. Most of them involve in-page SEO optimizations. However, sometimes that isn’t enough.
Google and other search engines give a lot of preference to page speed while ranking a website. A website that takes more than 3 seconds to load will fall in rankings, and most users won’t bother opening it. This is where a content delivery network or CDN comes in.
Content Delivery Network
Content Delivery Networks are special servers that are used to deliver webpage content across the world. CDNs are used by many major online businesses such as Amazon and Google.
CDNs are a collection of servers placed at different geographical locations around the world. These servers duplicate and store data about your website. The primary purpose of a CDN is to improve the performance and page speed of a website. Websites supported by CDNs tend to load faster and are more stable during usage in comparison to websites without CDNs.
Here are a few features of a CDN network:
Reduced Latency: The Internet is a wonderful thing. But it suffers from one small problem, and that is latency. Transferring data over long geographic distances takes time. If your website server is in the USA, someone in the UK will take significantly longer to load your website. But a CDN server in the UK will ensure that this latency is absent, and your website will load faster.
Faster Page Load Times: When you use a CDN, your Internet’s DNS servers need to make a lower number of query requests to locate your web pages. Since a CDN server is nearer, your DNS will retrieve data faster, driving down the load times for web pages.
Better Availability: A hidden advantage of CDN is that if your website goes down due to technical issues or cyberattacks, chances are it will still load from CDN servers. This way, your users can still use your website even if a part of it is not working.
The Benefits of a CDN
Content Delivery Networks are a crucial component for business websites that operate across the world. Depending on where your clients are from, CDNs can significantly help you rank better on their search engines and also load your website faster.
According to a recent survey, the average user only waits 3 seconds for a web page to load. It is imperative that you load web pages under that time frame. A CDN will ensure that that happens!
Here are some benefits it brings to your business websites:
- A cost-effective solution as free CDNs services are often included in website building tools
- Reduces bandwidth costs
- Helps businesses comply with DMCA and GDPR protocols
- Assists SEO in ranking better
- Improves overall customer experience on your websites
The easiest way to have a CDN is to use a website builder that supports free CDN. Many website builders provide built in CDN services that can be leveraged for your website rankings.
Summing Up
CDNs are increasing in demand as streaming services, online web apps, etc, become more common. For now, CDNs can still be found for free. It is only a while before services start charging separate prices for CDN access. Before that happens, it is recommended that you get your hands on a CDN for your website.
Increase your page’s rankings, your website speed, and enhance customer experience with your business website. You can find a website builder that provides free CDN by searching online. Good luck! Get free CDNs for your website today!
