When it comes to using technology, small business owners always have a dilemma whether to use it for their business or not. Content delivery networks are typically meant for providing faster delivery of static and streaming content to the users from the network of servers located at the possible nearest geographical location. CDNs are equally important to SMEs as much as they do for big companies if they need to have better performing sites. Large companies often find it as cost effective solution for their businesses because they can save money on hosting by reducing the bandwidth. However, SMEs have to analyze whether it is viable for their websites, and work on the numbers based on their customer base and budget. SMEs who are typically habituated to traditional hosting think twice about CDN because they don’t realize the actual benefits of using it for their websites.
Here, we have mentioned some of the benefits of using CDN for small and medium businesses –
Increases Website Speed
For any internet business, speed and latency are very important to attract new customers as well as retain the existing ones. Especially internet sales based organizations have to ensure their sites are loading faster within few seconds to make the customer stay with the website. If pages do not load in a few seconds or downloads become hard, then customers less likely come back to that website in future. They would rather prefer to visit a well performing small website than stuck up with slow ones belonging to big companies. As long as the website is secure and convenient for shopping, customers barely care for the size of the company. CDN makes the websites available to the users without any delay eliminating speed & latency issues. This gives a better scope for SMEs to compete with big companies and grow their business through websites.
Keeps the Site Live During Outages
Sometimes, even the small business owners go through lot of stress when their websites are down resulting in lost business productivity. The outage could be planned by the hosting provider or it could be unplanned due to various reasons. The losses incurred during site downtimes depends on the nature and scale of the business. Even a couple of thousands of dollars in loss is a big amount for small businesses. No matter what the reason for outage might be, CDN keeps the site alive by serving the content from multiple server locations. CDN gives a competitive edge for SMEs because it ensures continuous availability of sites to the customers while their competitors are having downtime and performance issues.
Cost Savings
Oftentimes, many companies try to establish their businesses in a specific region of the world, but fail to do so due to lack of services in these places to properly execute their strategies. SMEs that are planning to expand their business to wider extent using CDN will result in noticeable savings for their company. Instead of spending money on infrastructure and separate service providers across the globe, they can use a global content delivery network service that works in various regions. If businesses are using traditional hosting, then they can cut down their hosting costs by reducing their bandwidth usage implementing CDN. Either way it is beneficial for small and medium companies who work on tight budgets to run their businesses.
Helps in Improving Search Rankings
Website speed and performance are part of the metrics that Google usually considers while determining the search rankings. Even though these two are not the only ones that decide the search ranking, they both definitely are crucial to combat against competitors site. A site with good speed and faster delivery of content will likely rank well than a slow performing website. In fact, ranking well in search engines is specifically important to small and medium companies to get more online visibility of their products and services.