CDN stands for content delivery network. It’s a network of geographically distributed servers that stores (caches) content from your website or application in multiple locations. This content can include images, videos, HTML pages, stylesheets, and more. A CDN can speed up your site or app and protect against threats like DDoS attacks. Without a CDN, when someone located far away from your server tries to access your website, content load time can be slow. A CDN alleviates such latency by loading the content from a server in a closer location. Furthermore, if hackers compromise your server, a CDN will help keep your site online.

CDN caching is the process of storing copies of your website content files across the server network.

A CDN edge server refers to servers at the edge of a CDN network, geographically closest to the person requesting content to speed up website or application loading times.

A CDN is essential if you want your website to reliably reach a global audience. Websites are crucial to maintaining a strong online presence, so you must ensure it performs well. A CDN speeds up your site, helps it stay online, and protects against cyber threats. So, if any of these elements are important to you, a CDN is crucial.

Website performance typically refers to how fast and responsive your site is. You can use various analytical tools to measure performance aspects such as page load times and how much time users spend on a webpage. To put things in perspective, the optimal time for a webpage to load is two seconds. If your site loads slower than that, a CDN would be beneficial.