Magento has created a noticeable presence amongst e-commerce companies since its launch in 2007. Now, the release of Magento 2 brings some long-awaited improvements to the original platform – such as endless scalability, the latest frameworks and new coding patterns that promise to make it easier than ever to launch an online store.
There is no denying the fact that Magento 2 is the best e-commerce software to power your online business. And that’s exactly why it has 26% of the market share with sales projected to hit $4.14 trillion by 2020.
From small enterprises to high-end brands like Nike, Christian Louboutin and Vizio, the world’s biggest e-commerce sites are powered by Magento and use a Content Delivery network, i.e. CDN.
A CDN is effective at speeding the delivery of content from high-traffic websites and stores with a global reach. CDN servers also protect sites from massive surges in traffic and make them faster for prospects and buyers anywhere in the world.
Simply put, this is primarily a tool to help your Magento 2 website handle visitor demands for massive amounts of data at lightning-fast speeds. Remember, visitors want HD videos, flash sales, large downloads for eBooks or other digital giveaways, etc. If your e-commerce site isn’t delivering it, someone else’s will.
What Is a CDN And Why E-commerce Sites Need One?
Emerging technologies and increasing internet connectivity speed have given way to a need for fast loading websites. This is now an essential requirement for customer conversion for online stores among many other functionalities and features of online stores.
And it’s not just the site’s visitors – search engines also prefer websites that load within milliseconds. As such, the success of an online store often comes down to how quickly its pages and content are made available to the visitor.
The speed of a Magento 2 store usually depends on the hosting, i.e. where the site data is saved and the location of the hosting provider.
So, let’s assume that your Magento 2 e-commerce store is hosted with GoDaddy or SiteGround on their North American data centers. If a user visits your e-store from within North America, they’ll see your website performing at its optimum in terms of loading speed – this is because of their proximity to the source of the data.
But if you get a visitor from Asia, the website will be slow because of the sheer distance between the source of the data and its target.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) make Magento 2 e-commerce stores better by helping them overcome this conflict so they deliver a better user experience.
How CDN works
CDNs maintain a server infrastructure all over the globe and place a cached version of your website’s content on each edge server. This geographically-distributed group of servers can work together to allow for a speedy transfer of assets required to load content.
This cached content can include images of your products, CSS or JavaScript files, stylesheets, videos, and other fundamental components that ensure smooth operations. The data takes less time to travel when it’s hosted on a CDN, thus substantially decreasing the load time.
CDNs can help merchants and online businesses deliver exceptional customer experiences in a variety of ways. Besides the speedy loading of your web pages, these can draw in traffic from multiple platforms like YouTube, Facebook etc. Also, when you choose a high-quality, well-configured CDN, it can help protect against spam and malicious attacks on your website.
Let’s learn more!
Advantages of CDNs for Magento 2 Merchants
You can make a feature-packed website that showcases all your products correctly and give buyers a seamless checkout process – all with the help of Magento 2.
A great CDN can further add to your website’s capabilities by making it faster and safer for visitors.
Below’s how that happens.
Reduced Bandwidth & Infrastructure Expenses
The e-commerce website is a bridge between what you are selling and those who are willing to buy, so there should be an interrupted flow of information between the servers. But constant traffic can consume bandwidth, choking the flow of information.
The CDN technology can reduce the stress on bandwidth by letting you limit the data flow while fulfilling requests for data from visitors. In turn, Magento 2 gets the benefit of enhanced infrastructure and dynamic capacity that only CDNs can offer.
Improved Content Delivery
Content delivery is the foundation of an excellent e-commerce business and Magento 2 already has a lot to offer in this regard. It provides improved performance as compared to the previous versions and a CDN can further amplify these qualities by ensuring quick delivery and seamless display of content.
Enhanced Website Security
The new platform offers some great security features such as two-factor authentication that can help you add a robust layer of protection to your store. You can use SSL to secure your website and ensure the safety of all who shop with you.
But even the most secure of servers can be subjected to harmful viruses and malicious content – and this is where a CDN comes in.
In addition to keeping your site live, it can help protect your data and information by securing it with a powerful TLS/SSL certification.
Web Analytics
Reporting and analytics are very much a part of a successful and profitable online presence.
Magento 2 has a great reporting feature that gives you insights into three critical areas; orders, customers and products. It can tell you about the taxes owed, number of customers, number of sales, which products are selling the best, etc.
Advanced CDNs can deliver even better web analytics for our site, including page loading time, the time a particular visitor spends on a page and overall performance of the website amongst many other metrics.
Paired with Google Analytics, these statistics can help you understand how your customers interact with your website so you can make their experience even better. This information can also help you carry out target market analysis to create marketing and advertising strategies that deliver results.
Scalability & Flexibility
Magento 2 makes it easy for admins to create and edit information for more e-commerce products without causing any data conflicts. Overall, it improves the efficiency of backend operations and enhances the database to handle peak loads.
CDNs can further empower a Magento 2 store by keeping the costs down as cloud platforms tend to be a lot cheaper than traditional hosting domains – in fact, they are also more efficient and safer. These qualities make Content Delivery Networks a must-have for any e-commerce business.
Lower Bounce Rate
Google uses site speed as a ranking mechanism while people tend to think that fast-loading sites are better, so they visit more pages and buy more products.
A high bounce rate means that your site’s visitors don’t stay too long before going off to another website – possibly your competitors.
Page load time can affect your bounce rate; research shows that pages that load in under 2 seconds have an average bounce rate of 9% which can increase to 38% for pages that take 5 seconds to load.
CDNs can help your Magento 2 site load faster, thus lowering the bounce rate and ensuring that your visitors stay on your site for as long as possible.
Higher Ranking in Search Results
When websites have higher than usual bounce rates, search engines like Google take notice and penalize the site for lack of value by lowering its ranking in the results.
Then there is the fact that if your site is slow, search engine crawlers (these spend a limited amount of time indexing it) will not be able to go through each page of your website and move on to the next one as soon as its time is up. This can also adversely affect the chance of your site ranking well.
In other words, if all else is equal between two sites – the content, navigation, advertisements etc. – the site with the fastest loading time will always rank higher.
The Last Word
Magento 2 has many benefits for merchants, developers, and customers alike.
These qualities are enhanced when the store is hosted with a CDN, creating a stellar shopping experience for buyers with improved scalability, better performance, and stronger testing abilities.