CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) makes your websites load faster, wherever your users are. A CDN isn’t a replacement for your web hosting: it’s an extra way to increase the speed of your site, globally.

How does a CDN work?

A CDN will store a copy of the public content from your website on servers around the world. So instead of it being stored at one or two data centres, it’s stored at dozens. These data centres are located at key locations in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia. They’re the same data centres that used by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

So, if someone visits your website, they’ll receive the content from the data centre closest to them.

Why do I need a faster website?

A fast-loading website has lots of advantages:

• Your users are more likely to spend time on your website if everything loads quickly
• Mobile users and those on slow networks or expensive data plans will be catered-for
• Faster sites are given preferential treatment in Google, improving your SEO

How else can a CDN help me?

As well as improving performance, it also makes your website more stable. As there will be fewer network ‘hops’ from your user’s device to the data centre, there are likely to be any problems with the connection.

Is it complicated?

Not at all – you can activate the CDN in a click and then forget about it. But if you want to find out more, you can see detailed usage statistics and make granular customisations to how it works. You can also use it to block users from particular locations.

Are there any limits?

No - unlike any other CDNs there are no bandwidth limits.

Website Optimisation

As part of our CDN we also give you tools to make your website faster. It does this by compressing and optimising the files that your website uses: images and code.

For images, it will:

• Compress them so the file size is smaller, without any visible loss of quality
• Resize them if they’re too large for the page
• Convert them to next-gen image formats
• Apply lazy loading, so images that can’t be seen won’t be loaded until they’re needed

For code, it will ‘minify’ it, stripping out white space and making the file sizes smaller, so your website will load quicker.

It does all this automatically when it’s turned-on. You can use our ‘one-click optimisation’ to quickly give your website a speed boost, or go in to detail and tweak over 30 different options. Try it out today – and see your Google PageSpeed scores rise.