Do I Need CDN for My Local Business Website?

CDN does help your website that only has local visitors even though you may think it is only needed for websites with global visitors. That’s because CDN isn’t just about delivering your website from multiple locations, it does a lot more than that.

CDN is an important element for delivering your website to people all over the world. That’s because it stores your website contents in many locations around the world and so it can serve your website to people from a location that is closest to them. This makes your website load fast to people anywhere in the world. But this brings up the question about the necessity of a CDN when your website only has visitors from a local area.

CDN isn’t something you have to have for your website. But it provides so many benefits that it is has become a go to choice for anyone trying to optimize their website for better speed, reliability, and security. Because the primary purpose of a CDN is to increase the performance of your website, you should consider using it as long as it can do that.

Just because you may not be able to take advantage of its global delivery system for your local website, doesn’t mean it can’t help your website in other ways. That’s because you can get a lot of other benefits from a CDN other than its delivery of your website from multiple locations.

How Does CDN Help My Website?

A CDN will help your website in a lot of ways but here are the few most important ones that will greatly help your website.

Fast Website Load Time

One of the most important benefits of a CDN is that it stores your website files on its many data centers spread around the world. Then when someone wants to visit your website, it serves your website files from the data center that is closest to your visitor. This makes your website load fast to everyone all over the world.

Load Balancing

If there is any moment when your website gets a lot of traffic at a time, your web hosting provider’s server may not be able to handle that. And if they can’t, your website will load time will increase significantly or your site will crash completely. Therefore, visitors won’t be able to browse your website. This will harm your business significantly because it will go down when it was needed the most. In this case, a CDN will be a lot helpful because it will route your website traffic to multiple locations and protect your website from crashing.

Uptime Benefit

When you are reliant on just the web server provided by your website hosting company, your website might go down because of any connectivity problem, hardware failure, natural disaster, or any other reasons. But a CDN will ensure nearly 100 percent uptime for your website because of it storing your site in many data centers all over the world.

SEO Benefit

You can use a CDN to store all sorts of your website contents like images, text, and other files therefore they will load very fast when a visitor connects to your website. This increase in load time from all over the world will help your website rank higher in sear engines.

More Visitor Retention

People don’t like to browse a slow loading website. Therefore, if your website takes longer to load, you will start to lose visitors because of that. In fact, Google recommends website load time to be under 3 seconds and for e-commerce sites this should be under 2 seconds.

Security against Cyber Attacks

There are many forms of cyber-attacks that many websites go through. CDNs work as a fence between your website and the attacker. Therefore, a CDN can give you security again many of those attacks. And the most common of those are DDoS attacks, WAF, and so on.

Why Do I Need CDN for My Local Website?

CDNs will help your local website in most of the ways it will help websites with visitors from all around the world. But there are some specific reasons that will make using a CDN beneficial for your local website.

Mediocre Web Hosting Plan

If you are hosting your local website with a mediocre web hosting provider, then their poor web hosting infrastructure will affect your website performance. Also, if you are using a shared hosting plan, then your website performance will be affected by others on the same web server. Therefore, to maintain good performance for your website, you will want to use a CDN.

Big Local Area

Just because you have a local website doesn’t necessarily mean that your website visitors will be from a small area consisting of a few kilometers radius. If your website visitors are from a country that is very big in size, then your web server from one side of the country may not give all your website visitors a good browsing experience. In that case, a CDN with multiple data centers in that country will help your website have a great performance to visitors all over the country.

Lack of Nearby Web Server

If you can’t find a good web hosting provider that has web servers near the location of your visitors, then you will be better off using a CDN for your website. However, in that case, you should try to find a CDN provider that has data centers around the location of your website visitors so that they can enjoy better performance from your website.

Sudden Increase in Website Traffic

If you are running any campaigns or it is a special time for your business like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and so on, then you may receive lots of traffic in a small period of time. In that case, your web server may not be able to handle that much traffic which will cost you lots of money. But a CDN will help your website maintain its performance even in the times of peak trafic.

Reduction in Web Hosting Cost

Web hosting providers generally charge for the traffic your website uses. Therefore, if your website exceeds a certain number of page views, a certain amount of bandwidth or some other limitations, then your web hosting provider will charge you more for that. But if you use a CDN, it will take that load off your web hosting server thereby reducing your cost with your web hosting provider.

When CDN May Not be Necessary?

Even though there are lots of reasons for using CDN, there might be situations for you when using CDN may not add a lot of benefits to your website. Here are some of those reasons.

Low Website Visitors

If you have a new website or if your website isn’t getting lots of traffic, then the value you would get from a CDN won’t be very much. So, you can wait until your website starts to get some more visitors.

Good Web Hosting Service for Local Traffic

A good web hosting plans like a VPS, dedicated server, or a cloud hosting plan from a good web hosting provider will give your website enough ability to serve a decent number of visitors. And if the web server that you are using is close to your local website visitors, then you may get by without using a CDN for your website. However, while choosing your web hosting provider from this perspective, you should consider some additional factors like site security, load balancing, scalability, and other services they provide.

Lack of Data Center

CDNs have a lot of benefits but if a CDN doesn’t have data centers near your local visitors, then they won’t do much for your website. In this case, you should look for alternative CDN providers. But if you don’t get any good option, then CDN will not do much for your website and so you can get away without using it.

Unwillingness to Do Extra Work

Using a CDN requires a bit of extra work from your part. You need to set it up first though it is pretty easy to do so. Then depending on your CDN setup you may need to do some additional work like if any of your files are cached on the CDN and you change or update those files then you might need to clear the cache from your CDN to provide your website’s latest contents to your website visitors.

Which CDN Is Best For Local Website?

Most CDN providers will have their Data Centers or PoPs spread across the world. However, their data centers are mostly concentrated in some regions than others. Therefore, you may find some CDNs have many data centers in one country but none in a few countries. That’s why if you are looking for a CDN provider for serving visitors from the USA, then you will see most CDN providers have multiple data centers there. But if you are looking in Asia or Africa you might find there are some countries where some CDN providers don’t have any data centers.

Therefore, you should first look if a CDN provider has data centers in the area where your website visitors are from. And in this process, you can take help from the CDN performance testing of CDNPerf. It shows a list of the highest performing CDN providers in the world. From there you can click on any CDN provider to see more statistics about it. You can then see how it is performing in your region. You can also go to their website to find out if they have data centers in your region. This way you can decide for yourself if a CDN provider is right for you.

But if you want to use one of the best CDN providers that provide unlimited CDN bandwidth among other features in their free plan, then you should check out CloudFlare. It is among one of the fastest CDN providers with over 200 data centers around the world. It also hosts over 20 million websites. In its free plan, you will get to use most of the features necessary for your website and you will even get to add as many websites as you want.

You can check out this article to know more about how you can reduce your website load time caused by DNS lookup.