MaxCDN Review – Why We Use MaxCDN

Many of our regular readers will know that we recently updated the site to a new look, but as well as that, we made a lot of back end changes to try to speed up the site a bit.  More and more importance has been put on website speed, of which is becoming a major SEO ranking factor.  For that reason alone, we wanted to look at ways in which to try and speed up the site and we found MaxCDN.

What Is MaxCDN?

MaxCDN is a Content Delivery Network (also known as a Content Distribution Network) that helps to spread out your content to different servers to help speed up your site.  Normally, you have all your files saved onto one server, so whenever someone clicks onto one of your pages, they have to wait for those files to load up.

Let’s say your server is based in the US (as mine is), the people that live closest to that area will experience quicker loading times than people on the other side of the planet in China.  This isn’t a major problem if the vast majority of your traffic is coming from one place (in this case the US), but if you have traffic coming to your site from around the world, then it can become an issue.

Furthermore, if your site became really popular overnight, perhaps one of your posts went viral, then it would put a lot of strain on your server.  This is where MaxCDN comes in.

By distributing your content (images, stylesheets (css), scripts (js), etc.) around the world on their servers, it can significantly improve the speed of your site.  Since switching we have had a lot of people say that our site is noticeably faster, and we are still making tweaks behind the scenes to improve this.

Added Benefits

As well as site loading speed increasing, MaxCDN will have a big impact on user experience on your site.  Due to pages loading much quicker, this will help reduce bounce rate and keep people on your site for longer.  This in turn will lead to more pageviews as people will be more willing to check out your other content that you have on your site.

One of the reasons we decided to make changes to our site was because we had had some server issues.  On a couple of occasions our server was under pressure at our busy periods, leading to our site crashing a couple of times.  MaxCDN offers better crash resistance by distributing the load from your server across their own set of servers.  So, your site shouldn’t have as many (if any) problems like this again.

Like we have said, search engines are putting more emphasis on site speed, so the faster your site loads; it will have a positive impact on your SEO.  Site speed can help you rank higher in the search engines, which can help drive more traffic to your site.

Who Should Use MaxCDN?

Well, anyone really!  If you have a website with a global audience, it can help your site out significantly.  This is even more relevant if you have a very large website with lots of content.

One of the great things about MaxCDN is that it is easy to integrate with WordPress.  You can just set up an account and install MaxCDN on WordPress pretty easily.