CDN
A content delivery network: a group of servers around the world that keep copies of your website's files and deliver them from a location close to each visitor.
A CDN, or content delivery network, is a network of servers spread across many locations. It stores copies of your website’s files, such as images, stylesheets and often whole pages, and serves them from the location nearest each visitor. Cloudflare, Fastly and Amazon CloudFront are well-known examples, and many hosts include a CDN.
Why it matters to a small business
Distance adds delay. If your website’s server is in one city and a visitor is across the country, every file has farther to travel. A CDN shortens that trip, which helps pages load faster and can improve Core Web Vitals like LCP.
A CDN also takes load off your main server. During a traffic spike, or a flood of bad bot traffic, the CDN absorbs much of it. Many CDNs add security features such as attack protection and bot filtering.
For a small local business with mostly local visitors, the speed gain may be modest, but the caching, security and reliability benefits still help.
Example
A tourism business gets visitors from across the country. Its homepage images load slowly for people far from the server. After putting the site behind a CDN, images are served from nearby locations, and the main server handles far fewer requests.
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