Switching Over To Content Delivery Networks Retains Customers 50% of your customers will not be loyal if the website takes too long to load. CDN can help change that.
By Rustam Singh
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The ultimate goal of any start-up or business or entrepreneurial venture would be to expand globally, have multiple franchises or digital distribution of products and services across the globe. This sort of growth not only needs brilliant planning, stocking, accountancy, foresight, heavy marketing and publicity and investment, but most importantly, a website that's design so brilliantly it can handle international traffic, preferably much more than it is designed for. Websites act as the face of the company much before the product or services itself. In a cut throat competitive world, customers have fickle minds that have little to no retentive power to stick around for a slowly loading website. There are hundreds and thousands of rivals for virtually every product or service you're rendering that are exactly the same, if not better. Why should a customer waste a few seconds on a slowly loading website when they can just use an alternative instead? Here's where Content Delivery Networks come in handy, make your website load much faster and smoothly.
Many companies assume that just because their website loads fast at their head office, it loads just as quickly halfway around the world. This assumption is wrong. Physical distance greatly impacts the load speed of a website as content ahs to be fetched from multiple hops and servers from one corner of the world to another. A website hosted in California would load much slower in Sri Lanka than in New York, and these few milliseconds of delay add up for an overall slower surfing experience. That could mean a customer lost right there itself
How do CDNs work?
Basically, your data is copied across multiple services across the globe, in prominent internet usage countries, to provide a closer link to the server for local users. This means instead of a file loading from a server 2000 miles away, the file could be loading a mere 200 miles away instead, saving you valuable seconds. These seconds add up for an overall smooth experience.
How to setup a CDN for your website
- You set up a website using CDN.
- All your existing heavy data, particularly prioritizing images, video, style sheets & java scripts are copied to the CDN
- As media changes, these changes are passed on the copies on the CDN
- Just look up to find a good CDN deal and proceed from there. Pricing is done on a bandwidth-usage basis and is fair–starting at around $0.12 per 10TB (TeraBytes) of data transfer.
A slow website can really cost you
(Image source: www.accelweb.ca)
Just one second's delay in loading your website makes you lose 16% of your customers
(Image source: www.accelweb.ca)
40% of all visitors will bounce away if your page takes more than 3 seconds to load
(Image source: www.accelweb.ca)
Shockingly, 50% customers say they'll not be loyal if the website takes too long to load
(Image source: www.accelweb.ca)
How much attention do you pay on your website loading quickly? Let us know in the comments on our official Facebook page Entrepreneur India
