A content delivery network keeps cached copies of your pages, images and scripts on servers in many places. When someone visits, the nearest server answers, which shortens the trip and takes load off your main server. It is one of the simplest ways to make a site feel faster for a global audience.
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What it helps with
- Faster loading for visitors far from your origin server
- Lower server load during traffic spikes
- Extra protection against some kinds of attack
- Image resizing and compression, on many providers
SEO points to check
Make sure the CDN serves the same content to Googlebot as to users, that cached pages are purged when you publish changes, and that robots.txt and canonical tags stay correct. Serve images from a domain you control or from one that does not block crawlers.
Common mistakes
Caching pages that should differ per user
Logged-in or personalised pages need rules that keep them out of the shared cache.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not by itself. It can improve speed, which supports a good page experience, but it will not rescue weak content.
Keep reading
- TTFB (Time to First Byte): Time to First Byte is how long a browser waits between asking for a page and receiving the first byte of the response.
- Core Web Vitals: Core Web Vitals are Google's three user-experience metrics: loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS).
- Page Speed: Page speed is how quickly a page loads and becomes usable, and it affects both visitor patience and, to a limited degree, search performance.
- Image compression: Image compression reduces image file size, by removing unneeded data or by encoding more efficiently, so pages load faster with little visible loss.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free console for site owners. It shows how Bing crawls and indexes a site and offers SEO reports and URL submission.
- Content delivery network: A CDN is a network of servers worldwide that caches and serves a site's files close to each visitor, cutting load times and shielding the origin server.
- Crawl Errors: Crawl errors are failures that happen when a search engine tries to fetch a URL, such as server errors, redirect problems, blocked pages or DNS failures.
- Crawlability: Crawlability is how easily search engine and AI crawlers can discover and fetch the pages on a site.
