Over the past 2 years, site loading speed has become an important factor for SEO. Google is placing so much attention to it that they actually published the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to help people guage their site speed. Site speed is even more important for e-commerce platforms like nopCommerce, because buying decision can happen in split second. Often time, if an e-commerce site is not loaded fast enough, potential buyers may leave the site resulting in loss of sales.
And lost of sales is the last thing every site owners wished. That's why CDN (aka Content Delivery Network) has gained popularity over the years.
So what exactly is a CDN? CDN is a network of servers located around the world that take care of one thing - to ensure fast delivery of static content such as images (JPG, PNG, GIF), CSS and JavaScripts.
So why is it so important? If you think about it, static files actually makes up about 80% of a web page. If static files cannot be delivered in a consistently quick manner, site speed will be greatly affected.
But most site owners are not convinced to deploy CDN on their e-commerce stores, usually due to the following reasons...
1) CDN is expensive
Most people will be put off when they find that they need to sign up for another service to run their sites. CDN is no different, most people did not use CDN because they think it's expensive.
Truth is - it only cost a few dollars a month, and the results can be drastic!
One of the cheapest option is KeyCDN, which costs only $0.04 per GB of data transfer. Another popular provider is MaxCDN, which is not too expensive either, costing only $9 per month.
At only a few dollars a month, CDN is an invaluable investment if the increase in speed results in better user experience and potentially more sales.
2) I am focusing on local market, so I don't need CDN
While CDN is often used to ensure fast delivery of static content across different geographical areas, it's uses in local transfer cannot be overlooked.
The sad fact is - many hostings (including VPS and dedicated server) are just not designed for fast delivery of static content. Even if the server is located in the same geographical area as the intended audience, the content delivery speed is just isn't fast enough.
In this case, CDN is very useful in ensuring fast delivery of static files in a consistent manner.
3) I am on cloud server, so I don't need CDN
Sadly, cloud servers does not automatically guarentee fast delivery of static content such as images, CSS and JS. This is especially true if the target audience spans multiple countries / geographical areas.
The reason is that, even if cloud servers carry the term "cloud", they are still restricted to certain geographical area. Unless server frarms are setup to hold multiple instances of the same site across different countries or regions, even cloud servers are limited to one instance residing in one location.
For this reason, CDN is still a very powerful companion to traditional and cloud servers alike.
4) CDN is hard to setup
With our nopCommerce CDN Enabler Plugin, it only takes 10 minutes to setup CDN and have it enabled on nopCommerce. The plugin comes with proper documentation, from how to sign up for CDN service; to enabling it in nopCommerce.
We also provide very responsive customer supports in case you have any problem setting up the plugin on nopCommerce
Conclusion
If your nopCommerce site is loading very slow, you may want to consider deploying CDN as a way to speed up nopCommerce loading speed. Our nopCommerce CDN Enabler Plugin is a very quick and easy way to help you enable CDN and increase nopCommerce speed.
I am Woon Cherk, an