As WordPress Developers and Hosting experts we often get questions from customers about how they can improve the speed of their WordPress site. We often clients to improve performance with optimisation tweaks, however our most common suggestion to improve WordPress is to install a Content Distribution Network (CDN) for the most visible performance and speed improvements.
What is a CDN?
A CDN is like a turbo-charger for your website. It operates separately to your hosting to make your website appear faster for visitors – no matter where they are in the world. A CDN is a distribution network. If you are familiar with warehouse distribution it’s a similar concept. Goods are moved from the factory to distribution centres and from there they are shipped to stores. In the same way that warehouses make it simpler and faster to get goods to consumers, a CDN is a data-warehouse that serves website visitors faster, because the content has been move d closer to the end users of your website. So a CDN is a network of servers that are distributed around the world that deliver content (images, video and other files) to website visitors from the closest server to them, rather than from your web server directly.
How does a CDN work?
With standard web hosting a request for a web page comes to your web server. Your web server is housed in a data centre in a single location. When your web server gets a request, all the website information is served from that server. If your server is located in California in the United States, then it will be closer to website visitors in the US, and the site will appear to be fast. Website visitors that are further away from your server – for example if they are in Asia, Australia or Europe – will likely have a slower experience. When you implement a CDN, your website visitors will be automatically redirected to content that is served directly from the closest server in the distribution network, removing any delay because of their distance from the server.
What do customers think of Asporea CDN?
Here are some of the comments we received from customers, who added the Asporea CDN to their WordPress website:
- Speed – “once the software was installed and I added a few lines of configuration code, the site immediately started displaying faster.”
- Resilience – “our site is performing better… our site sees more visitors at certain times of day, and during those peak times we are able to handle more traffic, and the site remains fast – it doesn’t slow at all.”
- Happy users – “we noticed our bounce rate drop. More users are staying on our site for longer, and we think it’s because the site is generally faster and users don’t have to wait for content.”
- Search ranking – “We worked hard on our search engine optimisation, but after implementing a CDN we got a boost. Google loves us now, after a few weeks we saw our rankings increase, not just on Google but other indexes as well.”
Asporea CDN is fast and easy to setup
Asporea CDN is what we use on this site, so you can see the amazing performance it delivers. The Asporea CDN network contains distribution servers in 150 locations around the globe. So no matter where your visitors are, they can be assured your website will be delivered fast. As an added extra our CDN also protects your web server against attacks that would seek to slow your server down. When our network detects an attack, it shuts down requests from those locations so that your server is protected.
Installation of Asporea CDN is one of the easiest to do. You can use your existing caching software (like WP Rocket or WP Super Cache) and add the CDN address we give you. Or you can install our simple WordPress plugin. There are two pieces of information to copy and your Asporea CDN setup is complete. We believe it’s one of the simplest CDN configurations on the planet, because we all enjoy simplicity.
Try Asporea CDN for yourself, free!
We want to make it easy for you to experience how good Asporea CDN really is! Right now you can enjoy a full sixty-day free trial of Asporea CDN by using the coupon code FREETRIAL2018 at checkout. From there Asporea CDN is only US$10/month. You are never locked into a plan and you can discontinue at any time before the end of the trial period and not be charged. Follow this link to get started.