Tools for an Accessible Website: The Importance of Content Delivery Networks
When hosting a website, a content delivery network is vital to make your site more accessible. These CDNs cache HTML pages and other web media formats in servers all over the world, so that they can be loaded quickly and conveniently for end users.
They make website hosting easier, drastically reducing host bandwidth and protecting against threats. Here’s a breakdown of how CDNs work and how they can help online business owners.
Making Websites Accessible
There are many ways to pursue web accessibility. First, see what you can do from the front-end of your site before pursuing backend support.
Copy what the pros do by making your site attractive. Industry giants achieve this by putting forward a wide variety of offers and bonuses for their services. For example, iGaming sites will offer one free spin each day for a game to get users involved and give them a reason to come back. Through good faith appeals to the wider audience of the internet, a website can slowly grow its audience over time.
Once you have the traffic to justify backend support, then the CDN comes in. At its core, a CDN makes websites accessible to more users by expanding its reach. They operate globally and can take more traffic than your host servers, meaning more visitors can interact with your site at once. Cloudflare is a popular example of a CDN that supports millions of websites.
How CDNs Work
What we call a CDN is just a web of servers that are connected and strategically housed all over the world, usually at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). By placing these proxy servers in every continent, full to the brim with cached media from client websites, CDNs connect local users to those client sites faster and cheaper.
For example, a site hosted out of Britain would benefit from a CDN with servers in America so the host servers don’t need to send data across the Atlantic. This has other practical benefits like avoiding Internet traffic congestion and improving security, detailed below.
Other Benefits of CDN Use
Along with making your website more accessible, there are other benefits to making use of CDNs.
Firstly, websites that use a CDN have faster load times. This makes sense when you realise that CDNs host web content closer to the user, so of course that content will load faster. Anyone in the SEO field knows that page load speed is important. Pages that increase load time from one second to five seconds can experience a 90% increase in bounce rate.
Next, the main expense that webmasters face is hosting costs. CDNs reduce data crunching from the site’s host server, making hosting cheaper. Likewise, CDNs are distributed, so they take stress off the host server. This means the site can handle more traffic and survive higher degrees of hardware failure.
As a standard, the leading CDNs also come with a variety of security benefits. They make client sites more DDoS-resistant by handling traffic. CDNs also protect themselves with sophisticated encryption and follow SSL/TLS protocols when distributing client pages.
After considering the points above, you should now understand how important CDNs are to the online information ecosystem. They are considered a mainstay layer of the internet, delivering content from servers to screens everywhere.
