How our CDN improves website speed
Improve website speed with our Free CDN and suit of website optimisation tools.
What is a CDN and how does it improve website speed?
CDN is an acronym for Content Delivery Network. A content delivery network (CDN) improves website speed and makes your website 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.
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 are 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.
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 and faster sites are given preferential treatment in Google and Bing, improving your SEO. 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, hence there are less likely to be any problems with the connection. A good CDN will also include other website optimisations and page caching too.
Not all web hosts have a content delivery network (CDN) and those that do you will often find this service comes at a premium, but not here at Merlin’s Web, you get access to our content delivery network for free when you host your website on our WordPress optimised platform, where you’ll improve website speed to blisteringly fast speeds.
Can I still improve my website speed if I don't have access to a CDN?
Yes, there are still things you can do to increase website speed. If you are using WordPress you can do this with a caching plugin, one of the best ones available on the plugin repository is WP-Optimize, one of it’s key features is Gzip capability, I highly recommend turning that feature on. If you’re not using WordPress then you can find more information about website optimisation at https://developers.google.com/speed
Here at Merlin’s Web our CDN is not complicated to use in order to improve website speed, it’s so simple you can activate the CDN with one 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 within the control panel. You can also use it to block users from particular locations too and unlike other web hosts CDN’s there are no bandwidth limits with Merlin’s Web.
As part of our CDN we also give you tools to improve website speed and make your website faster. It does this by compressing and optimising the files that your website uses which are 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 switched 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 and Bing Page Speed scores rise to lightning fast speed.
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