A Beginner’s Guide to CDN: What it is and How it Works

Love Sharma
ByteByteGo System Design Alliance
8 min readFeb 23, 2023

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Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed server system that delivers web content to users based on their geographic location. The purpose of CDN is to reduce latency and improve the overall performance of websites and online applications.

When a user requests a web page, the content is delivered from the nearest CDN server rather than the origin server, which can be thousands of miles away. This leads to faster load times, improving the user experience and contributing to higher search engine rankings and lower bounce rates. CDN also helps mitigate the risk of server crashes and reduces the load on the origin server. This is achieved by caching and storing frequently accessed content on the CDN servers. When the origin server experiences high traffic, the CDN server can serve the cached content, preventing the origin server from becoming overwhelmed and crashing. Another essential benefit of CDN is security improvement. CDN providers offer DDoS protection and SSL encryption to secure the content delivery process and protect websites from cyber-attacks.

CDN can help with search engine optimization (SEO) in a few ways. Firstly, because a CDN improves website performance, it can lead to faster page load times, a critical factor in search engine rankings. For example, Google considers website speed when ranking pages in its search results.

Cheat sheet for CDN

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Love Sharma
ByteByteGo System Design Alliance

Love is an experience cloud engineer with a demonstrated history of building large scale enterprise application.