Every superhero needs a sidekick: 5 reasons your WordPress site could use a CDN

There was a time when developing and designing a website was a truly expensive, time-consuming and onerous ordeal that involved things like custom content management systems and on-site page builders. Back then it was almost unimaginable that a free, open source content management system could make having a great website an easy reality for almost anyone, but then came WordPress and everything changed. At a bare minimum, all anyone had to do was pick a theme, do some typing and image uploading, and away they went.

Then the internet got all complicated and competitive and it once again became unimaginable that even WordPress could arm website owners and businesses with everything they need to have a truly excellent website. WordPress still comes pretty close, though. All it needs is a little help from its friends, like a content delivery network or CDN, a global network of proxy cache servers dedicated to improving website performance.

Here are five reasons your WordPress website will be that much better with a CDN:

Your website has human visitors

As the saying famously goes, to err is human; to rage because a web page loads too slowly is also human. Or something like that. The point is, people don’t like it when websites load what they consider to be ‘slowly’, so much so that 25% will abandon a site and go find a competitor after waiting just four seconds.

With its proxy cache servers smattered all over the globe, one of the main things a CDN does is improve page load time. It does so by caching all cacheable content, which for advanced CDNs is static as well as some dynamic content, thereby eliminating trips to the origin server, and then redirecting website users to the server closest to them, cutting down the distance requested content has to travel and greatly speeding up the entire process.

Those human visitors need security

If your users input anything, anything, on your website, they need to be able to trust that data is protected from attackers who would otherwise position themselves between a user’s browser and the website and intercept that information. Especially if that information contains login details and passwords, financial information, names, addresses or any other type of identifying information.

To protect information exchanged between a website and browsers, the website needs to use the SSL handshake when browsers connect to it. The SSL handshake takes the standard TCP connection handshake and adds in a few more steps in order to ensure that all information exchanged is encrypted and therefore unintelligible to would-be eavesdroppers. The problem is that those extra steps actually constitute at least two extra round trips between browser and server, which slows down the website and you’re once again dealing with page load time issues.

A CDN speeds up unencrypted sites handily, but it’s actually even more effective for sites using SSL because it shortens the time taken for each round trip with those geographically dispersed servers, which adds up to three-fold effectiveness for encrypted websites.

Your website also has non-human visitors

The internet is crawling with bots. Lots and lots of bots. While some of those bots are very good bots, many are not, and many are coming from DDoS botnets looking to overwhelm your website with malicious traffic, leaving it offline so your human visitors can’t use it. (Another thing human website users tend to not appreciate.)

A CDN is a multi-server environment, which provides you with built-in load balancing that helps deal with influxes of traffic, whether they’re coming from DDoS botnets or you just happen to score a big rush of traffic. Advanced CDNs also have additional DDoS protection, a feature well worth shopping around for in this age of DDoS assaults.

You’d like to be a little bit laid-back about development, design and updates

This is a judgment-free zone. Optimizing source code and images, performing content minification, making sure multimedia resources are used most effectively, making sure network sessions are handled most efficiently and minimizing how much bandwidth is used is all a lot to deal with. As is updating to the newest internet protocols, including HTTP/2 and IPv6. This can all be automatically handled by a leading CDN. Here you thought a CDN was just a website performance solution when really it’s your new best friend, one that never needs help moving.

You want the Google stamp of approval

Almost all website owners and administrators want to impress Google because it’s essential to website and business success. Faster page load times and better availability help improve search engine rankings, as does having a website secured with SSL.

Speaking of SSL, beginning in October 2017 Google is going to mark all websites that can have any data input, including queries in a search field, as Not Secure beside the address bar in the Google Chrome browser if they are using HTTP instead of HTTPS. The difference between HTTP and HTTPS? SSL. To avoid that big fat Not Secure label, and to avoid the lag that comes with SSL, it might just be time to double down on your initialisms and invest in SSL and a CDN.

Impressing with WordPress

There’s no one dominating their segment of the internet quite like WordPress is dominating the content management game, yet even they need a boost in certain areas. With a CDN your WordPress can be faster, more reliable, encrypted without page load lag, protected against DDoS attacks, have optimized content and network efficiency, updated internet protocols, better search engine rankings, and void the Not Secure label in the mega-popular Chrome browser. Yeah, not bad.