Why is your site slow? Here everything you need to know about CDN Cloudflare and more

Why is your page load slow? How can you diagnose the issues that cause the slow performance that affect your website and how can you solve this problem?

Today we will examine all the best practices to use when we talk about CDN Cloudflare and how to choose the best Content Delivery Network plans for your business and provide a high-quality video streaming service.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN CDN

CDN (Content-Delivery-Network or Content-Distribution-Network) is a large network of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet or in other words a group of interconnected points geographically distracted that locally transmit and redistribute a large fraction of the Internet contents of your servers including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media and social network content in a transparent and performing way.

The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance and also cache files that do not require a continuous update. (thing that a single server wouldn’t be able to provide due to the overload it could receive for the numerous requests of service from multiple servers).

Let’s understand it with an example: If you have a nice blog or website (eg located in California) visited by users from around the world (so not close to the original server) the request to upload the content of the site by one or more of your users (eg. a user located in India) can take much longer time to cross the global Internet network and reach the server, resulting in long and sometimes inconsistent waiting times, in other words, an unsatisfactory user experience.

HOW CAN YOU DIAGNOSE THE ISSUES THAT CAUSE THE SLOW PERFORMANCE OF YOUR SITE?

Many platforms provide activity time monitoring, page speed monitoring, transaction monitoring, server monitoring, and free tools that can test the speed of websites.

The most important metrics you should check during the test are:

• Load Time
• HTTP headers
• Uptime
• Third-Party domains

LOAD TIME:

One of the first thing to check is the speed of your website. This metric can deeply increase or decrease sales or visit on your site. Nowadays people are less and less concentrated and always in hurry so, even 2 seconds more of delay can make a huge difference and can make you lose hundreds of users.

HTTP HEADERS:

HTTP stands for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” and it refers to how servers communicate and respond with another server by sending information about the client’s browser, request page, server, and more. It is important to understand if your server communicates in the same way and if there aren’t error in their request.

UPTIME:

If the server is not running and starts to experience downtime, not being able to provide the services requested to their customers, the latter being unable to get the information they need, go to search for this information from another place.

THIRD-PARTY DOMAINS:

You might have videos or content that are hosted by third parties. They can be images, plugins, JS files or videos that could slow down the loading of your website, influencing the speed of site loading.

Here we suggest 5 of the best tools for website speed testing

• Pingdom Speed test
• Uptrends
• Uptime
• site 24/7
• Dareboost

BENEFITS OF HAVING A CDN

Using a CDN can bring a lot of benefits to your site and some of which are:

• cost reduction for bandwidth
• performance improvement
• high availability
• most efficient web protection

All these benefits reflect in a positive way into your SEO ranking which is one of the most important things in these days if you want to have the chance to appear on the top results of Google Search and achieve your goals.

HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST CDN FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

CDN can provide different services and each one can be more specific, for a different type of website.

In general, we can say that a good CDN has to have:

1. Adequate control on how content is cached on your network.
2. Minimize the bandwidth consumption and latency generate by geographical distance
3. Be able to deliver all kinds of files, from small files like KB to heavy files like MB
4. Provide security services for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection
5. Offer a good level of encrypted Internet transport (which helps speed up traffic sorting)
6. Specific quality and security services for video content
7. WAFs: is a firewall for HTTP applications. It applies a set of rules to an HTTP conversation. Generally, these rules cover common attacks such as Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection.
   (A WAF can be considered a reverse proxy, which is deployed to protect a specific web application or set of web applications).

SOME OF THE BEST CDN SOFTWARE:

CDN Cloudflare

CDN Cloudflare has the best and one of the most used CDN in the world, it offers a free plugin and can considerably improves the performance of WordPress sites with basics configuration. It can delivers ultra-fast static and dynamic content across the global network, in addition, offers a rich ecosystem of performance and security services tuned specifically for video. Cloudflare’s global network ensures fast video startup times and reduced buffering, no matter where your visitors are located. Offers a free plugin and drastically improves the performance of WordPress sites with minimal configuration.

Rackspace

Rackspace is a premium cloud computing service. It uses the Akamai’s network and streams the content up to 150 locations around the globe. You will only pay for the bandwidth you consume. The cons are that they do not offer a DDoS protection and that is a bit difficult to use for those who have little experience or for those who are not very tech.

Amazon Cloudfront

Is a popular CDN for websites offered by Amazon Web Services. It provides instant delivery of personalized and dynamic content in a faster way. This service is offered with the pay-as-you-go model, so there are no setup costs, but only fees related to the amount of data transferred to users.

Sucuri

Sucuri uses the best hardware and technologies required to improve the performance of the sites. They offer multiple caching options for different types of websites and unlimited bandwidth limits with every plan, in addition, they exploit DNS monitoring that alerts you when your site’s name servers, MX records, or IP address changes.

Google Cloud CDN

With Google Cloud CDN you can monitor all the latency, traffic and services metrics in detail. It offers a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) feature that is really good and safe. Cons: It’s pricing doesn’t suits for the small organizations, for startup or for someone having low requirements.

With our blog about content delivery networks, we hope you have learned some new insights into this complicated technology.

Whenever you need help with any aspect of your company, please feel free to contact us at our website.