How to Setup a CDN for Your Website?

As a website's speed has become a major ranking factor among search engines, it's important to use a Content Delivery Network or a CDN. The CDN is used to distribute the excessive load of HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos over multiple servers. Using a CDN, you can improve the web site's speed significantly and improve organic traffic.

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If you are new to CDN and looking for a step-by-step guide to set up CDN, then we have got you covered. In this post, we will have a look at quick steps that will help you set up a CDN for your website and get ahead of the curve.

Why CDN is important

There are several reasons why you should use CDN for your website even if you are doing business locally. Here are some most powerful reasons to use content delivery:

It enhances security:

The most significant advantage of using a CDN is that it improves the overall security of your website as it lets you integrate an SSL certificate without individually buying it. Having an SSL certificate is a major ranking signal that you should be following in 2021.

CDN improves speed:

As loads of heavy files are distributed among multiple distributed servers, the website performs faster even if you have hosted it on shared hosting. Website speed being among the most important factors, CDN helps you boost your SEO efforts.

It improves the user experience:

No visitor likes a slow website and CDN helps you improve the user experience and reduce the bounce rate as it boosts the website's performance. Even if your website is new, you can still improve the domain authority faster by offering a better user experience.

How to implement a CDN for your website

If we talk about the most popular and secure options, there are two widely used options that are — Amazon AWS and MaxCDN that bring in the best performance. Regardless of your industry domain, you can pick any one of them. On this note, let's have a look at easy steps to implement a CDN and boost your website's performance.

Step one: Pick a CDN and register your website

There are several options available to use including, MaxCDN, AWS CloudFront, Cloudflare, and Akamai that you can pick. Once you decide which one you need for your website, you need to register your website on that platform.

While registering your domain, the first thing you need to do is to set up a pull zone or the distribution. A pull zone is a common term used in CDN and it's a folder that acts as a bucket for your everyday support files. This file will automatically pull the data from a specific location that you will decide. These files are displayed to the end-user through either a subdomain of your CDN or a custom domain of your choice that will point to the CDN.

Step two: Creating CDN URL

The next step is to create your custom CDN URL, it is the common URL where all the website assets will point once you set up everything properly. Here the good practice to set up a CDN URL is to pick an easy name that is quick for you to search and replace in your database for all the website's existing URLs.

It's similar to doing the complete setup of a subdomain where you need to configure it as a CNAME record in the DNS settings of your host.

Step three: Pointing assets to CDN

For pointing the website's assets to your newly created CDN account, you need to replace the existing nameservers with the CDN name services. For doing this, you need to log into your domain registrar account and navigate to the domains section. Here you will find the list of all domains that you have purchased.

You need to click on the domain on which you need to point the CDN. Once you click on the domain name, you will find the two nameservers — you need to remove both of them and paste the new nameservers provided by the CDN.

Before submitting it, ensure the nameservers are correct, click on save and the changes will be saved. Once you make the change, the website will become temporarily down for around 30 minutes to 60 minutes. After that period, the site will be again up and running.

These were the three easy steps to integrate a CDN with your website and make it faster and more secure. And the best part about integrating a CDN is that you get an SSL certificate which improves the overall security of your website. If you are not using a content delivery network for your website, it's the right time to get started and boost your website's performance. Compared to other SEO practices and addons, CDN is an affordable way to get ahead of the curve.

Author – With over 13 years of experience as a leader in digital marketing, Mansi Rana is Managing Director of EZ Rankings – SEO Reseller. Passionate about all things data; providing actionable business intelligence in digital, future tech; and venture bubbles categories for everyone, everywhere.