Superfast WordPress: What is a Content Delivery Network?
A Content Delivery Network, also known as a Content Distribution Network, is a (deep breath) geographically distributed nexus of servers, working in unison to deliver readily accessible data to internet users globally. Phew! To put it more simply, CDNs are about getting your website stored in lots of places so that, whenever anyone visits, it loads up nice and quick — from wherever they are. What is a Content Delivery Network? CDN’s are networks of servers, distributed around the world, that store and deliver website content to visitors. They’re helpful because the distance between the server where your website is hosted and your visitors can have a huge impact on website loading times. The idea is simple: let’s say someone from Australia visits your UK website. Without a CDN, all your content will be retrieved from the same origin server, which may take two, three, or perhaps several seconds to deliver. With a CDN in place, servers work together to retrieve and deliver content already stored in a location much closer to your visitor. This means your Australian visitor could see your website load in under a second – just as fast as if the website were hosted in Australia itself. That may not sound like much, but it’s a big deal: 40% of people abandon (or “bounce” from) a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. In fact, 79% of shoppers who experience poor website performance say they’re less likely to buy from the same site again. What are the advantages of a Content Delivery Network? Lower bandwidth consumption – Every time someone visits your website and data is transferred from your origin server, this uses bandwidth. Since this won’t have to provide as much data with a CDN, your bandwidth consumption and costs will be reduced. Improved response to high traffic – If one of your ad campaigns goes viral and your website experiences a sudden, high volume in traffic, this can cause downtime for your website. A CDN will distribute this volume across multiple servers to prevent any of them from being overloaded. This way, your website remains available and responsive, no matter how many people are knocking on the door. Uptime – CDN’s are a safety net for your website, helping to make sure it remains accessible at all times. If a huge amount of traffic hits your website all at once, or if one server goes down, this can overwhelm your main website server, leading to crashes (and all sort unhappy visitors). A CDN spreads the workload across its global network of servers, handling those massive traffic surges and unexpected hiccups. Improved security – Hackers use distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disable websites and online services by flooding their server with traffic. A CDN can mitigate this by distributing this increased volume across its network of servers. How do Content Delivery Networks work? CDNs are built on the idea of having data centers at strategic exchange points around the world. These data centers are called Points of Presence (PoPs). This means there’s always a server close (or closer) to any website visitor. When the user goes to a website, the CDN fetches the necessary information from the website’s Origin Server (the central location where that site’s files and data are sitting). It then caches a copy of this content on the PoP nearest to the visitor. Requests for the same content can be served directly from the nearby server. CDN – Author: Seobility – License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Websites are made up of both Static and Dynamic content. Static content is elements that stay the same for each user (like text, images, and basic HTML), while Dynamic content is the sort that’s customised for each user interaction (like shopping baskets or personalised recommendations). CDNs are better when it comes to Static content, as this is easier to store on multiple servers. The end result of all this wizardry is speedier browsing. To simplify, the basic idea is this: 1. User Request ➤ Imagine a user in Sydney visits your website and wants to access a file hosted on your origin server in London. Let’s say this file is “cat.jpg”. The browser makes the request for the file. 2. CDN Check ➤ After the user’s browser requests the content, the CDN works out the closest and best Point of Presence (PoP) to make that request. It checks if a cached copy of “cat.jpg” exists on a server nearby — in this case most likely somewhere in Australia. 3. Hit or Miss ✅ Cache Hit: If the requested content is found on the nearby Edge Server, the file can be served up pronto. This is faster because the data doesn’t need to travel all the way from London. The Edge Server plucks out “cat.jpg” and delivers it to the user in Sydney. ❌ Cache Miss: If this is the first time the file has been requested from that specific PoP, it won’t be available in the cache. The Edge Server fetches “cat.jpg” from the Origin Server in London. It stores a copy (of your famous cat photo) locally in preparation for future requests. The key principle is that, even with occasional “misses”, doing it this way almost always results in lower average latency times overall. What’s the difference between a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Content Management System (CMS)? While often confused, CDN’s and CMS’s are very different kettles of fish. Content Management Systems are a kind of software that let you create, manage, and publish content. They tend to feature easy interfaces for adding text, images, videos, and other elements, so that you can build a website — without having to know any code. WordPress is a great example of a Content Management System. It’s the most popular CMS in the world, in fact, powering a huge portion of websites on the internet. WordPress is really flexible and customisable, with a huge community of users that makes teamwork easy and with
8 WordPress Plugins you have to Install
WordPress is one of the most well known blogging platforms. In recent years it has evolved so much that people like myself use it as the CMS of choice for all their websites. As well as this you can install a wide range of plugins, acting like extensions/add-ons to the WordPress platform, that can really help your site or blog in many ways. Here are 8 plugins I make sure I have on all WordPress sites: 1. WordPress SEO by Yoast Joost de Valk is a genius when it comes to WordPress, and this plugin illustrates that. The WordPress SEO plugin helps you with many aspects of optimising your site including editing META data (page titles and descriptions), inserting breadcrumbs, enabling an XML sitemap to help search engines find all the pages you want indexed for people to find, and lets you add information within your RSS feed so that other sites don’t just steal your content and put it on their own site. 2. Google Analytics Another plugin by Joost de Valk, which helps you connect your WordPress site to a Google Analytics account. If you are interested in analytical data this is a great plugin as it lets you segment data directly from the plugin settings page so you don’t have to learn code yourself! 3. W3 Total Cache Google doesn’t like websites that take a long time to load. In fact, they actually use page load time as a factor on where to rank your site in their search results. This plugin helps this by using a number of methods to reduce page load time. 4. WP Smush.it smush.it is a service owned by Yahoo! that lets you compress your images to the lowest filesize without reducing any quality whatsoever. Simple really! If you already have a bunch of images on your site that’s fine – there is an option to “bulk smush.it” which will go through each image already uploaded and compress them for you. 5. Facebook Comments I developed this one 🙂 This plugin inserts the Facebook Comments system into your site and places it above the native WordPress comments form. Once installed and configured you can then manage all comments within your Facebook account. I use this for a few reasons: There is less spam activity as you need to be logged into your Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL or Hotmail account. The comments are now indexed by Google, which means they are more SEO friendly than they were a month ago When someone comments on a post or page, the comment can be posted to their Facebook profile. This adds a social aspect to your site as the comment will appear on their friends’ news feed with links back to your site 6. Twitter Feed Another one I developed. This feed is a more SEO friendly way to output your latest tweets, search results, hashtags, mentions and favourites into your site. Using a simple shortcode is all you need to do to insert the feed and is highly configurable. 7. Gravity Forms This last one isn’t free but I use it all the time and is, in my opinion, well worth the money. This plugin takes contact forms to a whole new level! This highly versatile plugin helps you insert forms of any kind into your site from a simple contact form and questionnaire to a fully fledged entry form to create new posts within your own site. Everything can be configured from what is asked, whether new questions should be asked based on what has been entered already, and your thank you message once the form has been completed. 8. Simple URLs This plugin lets you manage outbound links and track them by clicks. So, for example, your blog site is at myblogname.com. Your link to somewhere you want to track outside of the site is abc.com. Instead of directly linking to abc.com you can make a Simple URL like myblogname.com/go/abc. This is good for a number of reasons. The main reason I use, is to use them for affiliate links. This way they are easier to give out to people, they’ll be tracked and you can keep them within your own domain and change where they link to at any time. This article was written by Alex Moss, partner at Manchester SEO agency FireCask. He provides freelance SEO for all kinds of businesses as well as developing WordPress Plugins. You can find him on Linkedin or follow him on Twitter. Follow @alexmoss
Open-source software is thriving and driving the web
This week, Joomla announced that its open source content management system has passed the 25 million download mark. Joomla claims some 2.7 percent of the web runs Joomla and it is not just being used by small businesses or start-ups looking for a cheap alternative. The modular appeal and proven stability means it has been used for the backend management of websites for brands including McDonald’s, eBay and Ikea. The Joomla community has thrived over the years, with apparent competitors offering support, help and technical know-how to one another in traditional internet style. Over 225,000 developers are now registered at the joomlacode.org site where developers are encouraged to contribute directly to the development of the core Joomla codebase. Meanwhile, Joomla developer communities exist in almost every nook and cranny of the web on forums and blogging networks. Joomla’s announcement included a rider – it may be even more than 25 million downloads. Although first released in 2005, Joomla admits it only started tracking the number of downloads for its CMS system in 2007. You can of course build your own Joomla-based site with 123-reg web-hosting with Joomla available as one of the free to install 123-apps, 25 million others can’t be wrong. Have you built your site with Joomla? We’d love to hear from you. Is Joomla capable of running a full corporate site?