If you have a WordPress blog, you’re certainly going to look for options to increase its speed and reliability and, at the same time, enhance its various security measures to ensure an appropriate user experience (UX) and overall better traffic and engagement.
Though there are various ways using which you can improve the speed and performance of your WordPress blog, your first consideration should be a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
If you’re a beginner in the realm of website hosting platforms, you should keep in mind that WordPress hosting services and WordPress CDN are two entirely different things.
In this context, we shall discuss why you need a CDN for your WordPress blog.
What are the various reasons for using a CDN for your WordPress blog?
Using a CDN for your WordPress blog/website will ensure that it’s faster and has better traction control. Besides this, a CDN will efficiently safeguard your website from different forms of cyberattacks and provide a temporary backup of your blog’s files in case your actual server faces an issue.
Let’s take a look at the various reasons why you should incorporate a CDN for your WordPress blog.
Saves bandwidth
When you opt for the best CDN (Content Delivery Network) service available on the market, for your WordPress Blog/website, it reduces the overall bandwidth usage of your actual server via the caching of files in the edge servers.
This helps in reducing bandwidth usage to a good extent, thereby minimizing the load on your server.
Moreover, a CDN helps improve the page load time of your WordPress blog and makes it faster, providing a more user-friendly experience.
Increased website uptime guarantee
Most of the reputable website hosting platforms offer near-perfect uptime. It’s not at all uncommon to come across web hosting services that claim to provide a 99.99% uptime guarantee. This basically means that your website is going to remain up and running 99.99% of the time.
In case you’re stuck with a below average hosting provider, downtime can be a more frequent occurrence. One of the various benefits of opting for a CDN is that it caches copies of your website, and saves backups of them throughout its different global data centres. If your server becomes unavailable all of a sudden, visitors will still be able to access those cached copies of your website thanks to your chosen CDN.
In this way, CDNs can serve as a backup system for the various files of your website, while you work with your hosting provider to get your website up and running once again.
The same thing applies if you have a WordPress Blog, and you run into an error that prevents users from being able to access it.
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Thanks to your CDN, you can troubleshoot errors at your own will and pace without having to compromise on traffic and engagement.
Faster pages
As already discussed above in the “saving bandwidth” section, CDNs cater to enhancing the page load times of your WordPress blog/website.
Page speed is one of the biggest indicators of the quality of user experience a WordPress blog seeks to offer. If a page takes three seconds or more to load, you’re very likely to start losing visitors and degrading your traffic and reach.
There are several reasons, like long distances between your server’s and the visitor’s location, your server being overwhelmed with requests, and your pages having too many unoptimized media assets, that can lead to longer times to load webpages.
Incorporating the usage of a CDN can solve all of the above mentioned problems in one fell swoop. With CDNs, you get access to a global network of data centres that can help to cache your WordPress blog. When any visitor tries to access your blog, the CDN will intercept that request and reroute it to the closest data centre.
Most CDNs also cache and optimize media assets, thereby, taking less time to load the pages of your WordPress blog/website.
Protection from DDoS (Denial of Service Attacks)
DDoS (Denial of Service Attacks) takes place when a coordinated network of bots bombard a server with a large number of requests all at once. These attacks have increased by a whopping 55% from 2020 to 2021, with up to 35% of online businesses experiencing these at some point in time.
Whenever your WordPress blog/website is under attack, visitors might not be able to access it. At best, they’re going to experience much longer page loading times, and there’s very little you can do apart from waiting out for the attack or reaching out to your web hosting service to see if they can assist you.
By incorporating the usage of a CDN, you add a layer of protection between your blog and the rest of the web. CDNs are created to withstand humongous amounts of traffic. Just by integrating a CDN, you’re already taking a huge leap in securing your website from DDoS.
SEO benefits and enhanced security
The speed at which a WordPress blog loads plays an essential role in search engine optimization (SEO). WordPress blogs that load faster typically achieve higher rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs).
When you enhance the performance of your WordPress blog via a CDN, you increase the likelihood of an improved search engine ranking, which in turn translates to greater organic traffic and enhanced visibility.
Furthermore, as previously noted, CDNs provide a range of security features to protect your WordPress site from numerous online dangers, including malicious requests, bot traffic, and DDoS assaults.
CDNs efficiently tend to combat these assaults by screening out malicious traffic before it reaches your server, guaranteeing the uptime and security of your WordPress site.
Scalability
CDNs are built to withstand unexpected spikes in demand and excessive traffic. When traffic to your WordPress blog or website increases, the content delivery network (CDN) can efficiently balance the load among its several servers. This combats server overload and guarantees that your blog remains accessible and responsive to every visitor.
Final Words
A CDN for your WordPress blog will effectively benefit you by enabling the enhanced caching of files, content and media assets optimisation, and the minifying of scripts used in your blog.
All these will seek to improve the overall performance of your WordPress blog, thereby increasing its uptime guarantee, ranking on SERPs, and user experience (UX).