Heard about CDN?
It stands for Content Delivery Network.
It’s technical stuff that happens in the back and is crucial for brands of all sizes. (Yes, even yours).
Today we’re going a bit nerdy and explain to you why it matters so much.
Think of that nagging anxiety at the back of your head about your customers not getting the best website experience from your site. Well, to be honest, you are not the only one who experiences such tension. Almost every website owner has to deal with this problem. This could impact your business as poor client perception starts to build up, and even if you are throwing in good or excellent content, it will hardly create an impact.
A method called CDN, an abbreviation for the ‘content delivery network’, has been developed to combat this issue. In the upcoming section, we will discuss in a bit more detail about Shopify CDN and explain how it can be a valuable tool to help your Shopify store deliver to its full potential.
The Idea Behind Shopify CDN
The primary idea of CDN is trying to make website responses faster. When someone clicks on a website, there is an issue of time being used up for the content to show up.
This issue is called latency and can be a result of high traffic in particular. This, in turn, makes the webpage load very slowly or incompletely.
When you are operating your store on an e-commerce platform like Shopify, this can be very bad for your business. It will badly impact sales, as people will simply be fed up and move to a different page.
To solve this problem, CDNs help to minimize this response lag and provide faster responses. We will explain this in the upcoming sections.
How Shopify CDNs Work
The main working principle behind CDNs is that they work or operate through a wide network of servers.
These servers are placed all around the globe at strategic positions or locations. These servers are also called PoP (Point of Presence) servers.
One server is called the host or origin server, which will be used for all files and file contents to the rest of the PoP servers. Once the files reach the PoP servers, they are stored as cached files.
When a website is visited, this request is sent to the closest PoP server, not the original host server, which could be several thousand miles away. The PoP server acts to provide the cached elements to the web page. This process is very fast, and more importantly, it is very straightforward as well.
Data no longer has to travel halfway across the world (or wherever the origin server is placed) to reach the webpage.
This greatly shortens the otherwise long-distance data would originally have to travel, and it also greatly minimizes traffic that has to be handled by the origin server.
All this contributes to the e-commerce page loading much faster and displaying all the information it is supposed to display.
How CDNs Help Shopify stores
Now that we got the general talk out of the way, it is worth looking into how CDNs can help you run your Shopify store and store.
You will be pleased to know that Shopify does offer its share of CDNs. The two most popular ones are Fastly and Cloudflare.
Moreover, to compress the files for easier and faster transmission, other programs like gzip are also used.
There are also some other ways that CDNs help the Shopify platform. These include:
Shopify CDN Benefits #1 – Faster Image Loading
This is, as a matter of fact, one of the greatest advantages of using CDNs in general. As we all know, images are an integral part of an online website.
They become a lot more important when dealing with online stores. However, the biggest problem you are likely to face is that they will take a long time to load.
With CDNs, however, the loading and reloading time is much faster. The main reason is that images are stored in special caches, and these caches are stored in servers.
Since the servers are distributed all across the globe at different locations, the image response time is very fast.
The asset URL is usually used for this, and all URLs can make use of this feature.
Shopify CDN Benefits #2 – Minification
Another handy feature is ‘Minification’, which, like the word implies, reduces or minimizes the CSS theme.
This means that the cached file size is much smaller than the original, making it a lot easier to store.
Another advantage of this is that it allows for faster browsing and reloading of web pages, as there is less data or the size of the data has been crunched down.
Shopify CDN Benefits #3 – More Reach
CDNs greatly increase or boost the overall reach your online store has. This is because they allow for connection with many more servers around the globe than usual.
This creates a better website experience and increases reach due to the close connection with servers worldwide.
How to Add to Shopify CDN
Adding to CDN is easy! When you are logged in as an admin in Shopify, there is a special area in the settings region, situated on the lower left-hand corner. You have to click on “Files” to access your images and other data.
The picture above clearly shows how this can easily be done. Now, once you are in the files area, you can start uploading files. The great thing is that Shopify does not have an upper limit on the number of files you can upload. Shopify also lets you access the URL of the picture or the file of interest.
This makes it much easier to upload files or photos to an external platform such as Amazon.
For embedded images, there is also a way to put them up on your Shopify online store. Shopify’s CDN follows a unique URL, allowing the upload and edit of bulk products. Here is an example for you –
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2779/6736/files/rolled-bathroom-towels.jpg
The first section of this unique URL is specific to a Shopify account – “https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2779/6736/files/”, whereas the final section of the URL goes by the file name/title you have set – “rolled-bathroom-towels.jpg”
When dealing with multiple images, it is possible to simply upload all images in the CDN area.
Conclusion
So we have reached the end of yet another article, and we sincerely hope it was of interest and provided valuable information. As you can now see, CDNs are of utmost importance. They greatly increase overall reach and make the customer experience on Shopify stores all the better.
So don’t waste any more time, and go for a CDN tool right away!