The success of an ecommerce or in this case a WooCommerce website is when it launches within no time and has no glitches while the customers are crawling through the website to make their purchase.
To make this possible, the integration of CDN with WooCommerce is essential. This blog will teach us more about CDN, its benefits, and how to set up CDN with WooCommerce.
Let’s dig in!
What is CDN?
The success of a website indeed relies on how fast its content loads and thus websites coming from different geographical locations also need to follow suit and that’s where the relevance of CDN comes in.
CDN or Content Delivery Network, is a group of interconnected servers in a region or all over the world which helps in the steadfast launch or delivery of content on your WooCommerce store.
The interconnected servers within the CDN temporarily store website content otherwise called cache like images, HTML, Javascript, videos, etc. When a user approaches your WooCommerce store the CDN will help load your content in no time. CDN acts as an additional storage space for the static files of your WooCommerce store.
CDN with WooCommerce offers many benefits and will be discussing that later in the blog.
Why does website speed matter for a WooCommerce store?
Speed is an important factor when it comes to enhancing the user experience. A fast-loading WooCommerce site is the best way to ensure that your customers stay around and have a great shopping experience.
A slow-loading WooCommerce store can cause a high bounce rate which will impact the SEO of your website and result in impatient customers who won’t return and also a loss of trust in the WooCommerce store.
Talking about SEO, Google prioritizes websites that have content that loads quickly. Therefore, if you want your WooCommerce store to load on the first position in SERP, then it is necessary to have the speed of your website checked and intact.
How a CDN with WooCommerce Improves Website Performance?
When CDN is integrated with WooCommerce, it brings in a lot of improvement in the overall website performance. Let’s look into the “how” part:
- Faster Load Time
As discussed earlier, we know how a slow-loading website affects your WooCommerce site. By integrating CDN with WooCommerce, you can surpass this and increase the load time of your online store. CDN will help launch static content like images, videos, etc from the nearest server.
As the distance between the servers decreases, it becomes easier to load pages faster thus helping customers to crawl around your WooCommerce website easily. So, if your customer is from the US and your WooCommerce site is hosted in India, the CDN helps the content load quickly.
- Reduced Server Load and Bandwidth Costs
With CDN in place, a considerable amount of requests are not sent directly to the main hosting server instead the cached files take care of loading the static content required by the users. This ensures that the main hosting server is reduced with load and caching and optimizations will help bring down the bandwidth expenses which is primary for websites.
- Better Global Performance and Accessibility
CDN with WooCommerce helps launch your website without limiting you to any geographical limits. Instead of using one single server as an access for the WooCommerce website, CDN helps in multiple interconnected servers which will make certain that the content of your website is delivered quickly.
- Improved SEO
When the content of your WooCommerce store loads instantly, then the users have no complaints and they stay around more to purchase on your website. Content loads faster through integrating CDN with WooCommerce thus having a direct impact on lowering the bounce rates. This aids in getting a good organic ranking as well.
- Better User Experience
A slow-loading cart or checkout page will tire the users and cart abandonment becomes the reality of your store. CDN with WooCommerce will make sure that this doesn’t happen and help your users scroll through your website without any unexpected delays. Smooth loading of product and categories page, easy loading of product images, and better transitions toward checkout steps.
- Secure Content Delivery
Most CDN providers give great security features like DDoS protection, SSL/TLS encryption, and firewall defenses. Correct compliance with security standards will provide surety to the different transactions and payments made by customers.
How to Set Up a CDN with WooCommerce?
In this guide, we are taking Cloudflare CDN to understand how it works with WooCommerce
Step 1: Checking the website speed
Before integrating CDN with WooCommerce, it is best to understand where your website stands in terms of loading speed. Usually, the page speed of a website is analyzed with the help of Google PageSpeed Insights. These performance metrics need to be taken multiple times and this has to be average to get the best loading speed.
Step 2: Create an account with Cloudflare
Enter the relevant credentials to get started with Cloudflare CDN.
Step 3: Add your website with Cloudflare CDN
Add in your main URL without http or https.
Step 4: Choose the right pricing plan
Once the plan is selected, the Cloudflare CDN will show all the DNS records associated with your website. Once the DNS records are verified, you can move to the next window.
Next, Cloudfare will show the existing nameservers and the new nameservers provided by Cloudfare. Replacing the nameservers will take around 24-48 hours.
Step 5: Configure Settings with WooCommerce site
You can now start configuring Cloudflare with the WooCommerce site. The configurations include setting speed, enabling Brotli compression, enabling caching, and adding page rules to the WooCommerce site.
Step 6: Test your WooCommerce Site
Once you have set up CDN with WooCommerce, now you can use Google Pagespeed Insights to test and compare the difference between the improvements in page loading speed. Check all the key pages to ensure their promptness.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Using a CDN with WooCommerce
Some of the common mistakes are:
- Caching Dynamic Content: It is necessary to be mindful when using CDN on dynamic pages like cart, checkout, or account. These pages contain that are relevant to users and hence it is not ideal to cache these pages fully. The page rules in CDN can help bypass these pages from caching.
- Not testing the WooCommerce website after CDN: The integration needs to be tested. When the CDN with WooCommerce is not tested it can result in slow-loading pages and broken links.
- Choosing the wrong CDN provider: Not all CDN provider works for you, so make sure to understand each CDN provider and then integrate the right choice.
- Forgetting to enable security features: As discussed above, Cloudflare has many different security features but there are chances of not enabling them and them later causing problems to the WooCommerce website.
Final Wrap
A quick-loading WooCommerce website is in itself a success. To make sure that the website loads correctly, it is necessary to integrate CDN with WooCommerce. But, it has to be done in the right way and this blog entails how to do it correctly.
FAQs
- How does a CDN improve WooCommerce?
CDN distributes static content within interconnected servers and thus helps in loading web pages of your WooCommerce store instantly.
- Is CDN mandatory for all WooCommerce stores?
CDN is not mandatory for WooCommerce stores, but having it ensures that you will provide your customers with reliable performance.
- Does CDN improve SEO rankings?
Yes, CDN will help improve SEO ranks as it reduces bounce rates and faster-loading sites.
- Is there a free CDN for WooCommerce?
Yes, Cloudflare gives free CDN which improves the performance of the website.