From the course: WordPress: Using a Content Delivery Network

Speed up your site with a CDN - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: WordPress: Using a Content Delivery Network

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Speed up your site with a CDN

- [Instructor] Before we talk about CDNs, let's start with a simple refresher on how the internet works. In short, it's a huge network of computers that are connected together via a wire. You may even have some of this wire buried in your yard. It can be made of copper or fiber optics, or it could be data bounced around through satellites or cellular networks. This wire enables computers or the servers connected to it to communicate with each other. Let's look at an example of how this works. So, here's you on your computer and you're connected to the internet via an ISP or internet service provider. Let's say you want to visit the LinkedIn learning website, which you can do by typing in a URL, linkedin.com/learning, which resolves to an IP or internet protocol address. You make a request from the LinkedIn learning website, such as to watch the video for this course, and the website sends data back to you. Now, pretend that you live literally down the street from the server that hosts the LinkedIn learning website. You would expect communication between your computer and that server to be pretty fast, right? I mean, there's hardly any physical distance to cover. But what if you're located halfway around the world from that server? Well, that's a long way for data to travel. You could expect that it takes a little bit longer to get there, which translates to slower page loads for you, impossible data degradation. That's where a CDN, or content delivery network, comes into the picture. Instead of all the files for a website, images, text, videos, scripts, et cetera, residing on a single server, static copies of those assets may live at multiple data centers across the globe. You may hear these referred to as points of presence, pops or ED servers. The idea is when you go to access a particular website, you can communicate with a server that's geographically closer to you, which translates to faster page loads. Technically speaking, faster page loads are a result of lower time to first byte, or TTFB. This is a measurement of how long the browser has to wait before receiving the first byte of data from the server. The faster it gets the data, the faster your page displays. And what else? There's lower network latency. Latency is the time that it takes for data to travel between its source and its destination. When data has to travel a long way, there's the possibility of data loss or corruption. Lower travel time or latency makes it easier to deliver high-definition content, like video or other media. Then, there's better response to traffic surges or spikes. Let's say that video you post gets picked up by local media and goes viral. CDNs use load balancing to distribute requests across servers to prevent overloading any single server. Load balancing helps keep the surge in demand from impacting website performance. And speaking of demand, many web hosts charge for data transferred from the origin server. By storing copies of content closer to the end users, a CDN enables fewer data transfers from the origin server, reducing bandwidth consumption and costs. These are just some of the benefits of a CDN. Interested in learning more? Well, let's keep going.

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