The main reason why digital publishers use content delivery networks (CDNs) is performance optimization and unalterably great user experience. But there are some other benefits, as well.

Companies that specialize on publishing content online have to face different challenges, but CDNs help successfully addressing them to deliver news, blog posts, images and other content to visitors. The problem existing today is poor web performance due to the raise of web page size (average page size today is about 2300 KB).

Why did it happen?

Scripts and videos have become much more widespread, and the number of images on an average web page has increased by 200%. This is particularly true for publishers who deal with content-rich websites. It is worth mentioning that basic optimization is often not enough to reach high performance, even if some special tools are applied.

How to boost website performance?

There are several commonly used tools for optimization of web speed:

• CSS Minifier, JavaScript Minifier, and HTML Minifier are instruments used to minify HTML and scripts;
• to resize images, you can use ImageOptim (for Mac) and RIOT (for Windows);
• GZIP compression will minify files;
• browser caching will boost delivery of some minor objects.

But even after implementing these measures, some publishers claim their pages take more than 3 seconds to load. It’s worth mentioning that visitors expect pages to load within 2-3 seconds, so they have negative experience when waiting for too long, and even a slight downtime can hurt conversion rates.

CDN as an Optimization Measure

Without a CDN, content is served from one single static location, no matter where the visitor is from. For instance, you may have end-users accessing your website from India, while the main server is located in the USA. The requests coming from India will have to travel across the world and then travel back to transfer the content. There are thousands miles of cables in the ocean for the content to overcome.

A website with CDN will deliver content from the server located as close to visitor as possible. CDN distributes content from multiple PoPs (points of presence) over the world. Since the content doesn’t have to travel too many miles of cabling, performance improves instantly. Besides, using CDN has some SEO benefits.

Why Publishers Use CDN?

In fact, CDNs can be used by different companies and websites, including publishers. There are several reasons why they choose this service:

1. CDN improves website speed considerably, but also serves as Google ranking factor. Such network can be easily used for search engine optimization.
2. Excellent user experience. People hate waiting, and CDN truly helps to reach maximum loading speed possible and front-end performance.
3. Security issues like DDoS attacks can also be addressed with a CDN.

Such popular publishers as Backlinko, CSS-tricks and Six Revisions already use content delivery networks to improve performance, and you can become the next.