Have you ever wanted your websites visitors to stay around for longer?
Have you ever wanted them to spend more money on your site, read more of your content or something else?
I have and so have countless other website owners.
The question is – what’s stopping them?
One of the biggest reasons is slow loading times on your website. That’s a huge problem.
Slow loading times means that your visitors get impatient and frustrated, this hurts your conversions and the result is that you lose money fast.
And when you consider that site speed is one of Google’s ranking factors, speed impacts your traffic too.
Are you ready to do something about it?
If so, keep reading and I’ll show you how MaxCDN helps me to make more money and deliver a far better user experience to my blog’s readers. And I’ll show you how to save 25%.
What is MaxCDN and how can it help you?
First of all, if you haven’t come across a CDN before, it’s a globally distributed network of servers that are tied together. This allows your website to serve things like HTML and images etc to your visitors from a server that is closer to them.
This can have a significant impact on the loading time of your site and can reduce load on your server.
MaxCDN is one of the leading providers of this type of service.
It’s used by the likes of Buy Sell Ads, StumbleUpon, The Next Web, Nissan and more. WP Engine use MaxCDN to provide CDN services to their customers.
5 Important reasons why you need a CDN:
- Saves bandwidth and reduces load on your web hosts server.
- Your websites loading time and performance will increase.
- Your website will be able to handle traffic spikes better (wish I used MaxCDN sooner, wasted a huge opportunity when I got on Buffers suggestion list).
- Faster load times reduce friction between your website and your audience – this means conversions increase.
- Potential increases in search engine ranking (Google uses loading times in their ranking algorithm).
How easy is it to setup MaxCDN?
Whether you’re using WordPress or another CMS like Drupal or Joomla – setup is straight forward.
Setup varies slightly from one CMS to the other but each tutorial is step by step and in depth (unlike the usual “tutorials” that other companies publish.
For WordPress users, the setup process involves using the W3 Total Cache plugin – it’s well worth using but for one of my sites I couldn’t find a tutorial for my caching plugin.
I hopped on support with MaxCDN to ask them (it’s 24/7 support) and rather than going through the setup process, the support agent offered to get this setup for me.
In less than 5 minutes, MaxCDN was setup on my site and I didn’t have to spend time doing it myself.
That’s the kind of support more companies should offer.
What features does MaxCDN come with?
MaxCDN has plenty of features; I’ll talk through them in more detail for you below:
- Rules that give you control – configure how MaxCDN delivers your content, best for advanced users but chances are you won’t need this.
- A full control panel – your control panel is straight forward and easy to use.
- Increased security – account security is taken seriously, IP whitelisting and 2 factor authentication is supported.
- SSL support – easily setup your SSL certificate. Also, protect retail transactions with shared SSL or pay an additional fee to use MaxCDN’s Edge SLL.
- Helpful analytics – discover exactly who is accessing your content and how.
- Smart API – bring MaxCDN resources into your applications with their REST API.
- Beyond basic websites – whether you want to deliver ads, video or online games – MaxCDN can help you here.
- 24/7 support – support is always one click away.
What about the SEO implications of using a CDN?
It’s extremely rare that I see people talking about the SEO implications of a CDN.
And it’s an important one because if you don’t consider the implications, you will potentially lose traffic.
From a technical point of view, CDN’s deliver your websites assets from a different URL (this could be a sub domain like cdn.domain.com or something different).
I’d like to believe that Google is smart enough to determine when a website is using a CDN, but it’s not worth risking it and allowing Google to index a bunch of duplicate content (that’s usually a bad thing).
MaxCDN has thought of this:
From a technical SEO perspective, MaxCDN has made a smart move here, when duplicate content could be an issue, using a canonical header is the way to go.
You can also use the robots.txt option above to stop Google from indexing any of the content running through MaxCDN’s servers.
You can find this in your account area and it’s worth enabling both options straight away.
Monitoring your CDN usage
On average, MaxCDN caches around 90% of the hits that my websites receive.
This makes things far easier for my hosting server and has a great impact on the user experience of my site.
You can monitor this usage easily from your MaxCDN account:
How good is MaxCDN’s support?
Support is important and it’s where most companies fall down.
MaxCDN have an extensive knowledge base that is written in a way that we can all understand. They have a getting started guide that shows you how to get setup – that’s easy to follow too.
They also have a range of plugins for different content management systems which makes getting setup easy.
As for the actual support, you can contact them 24/7, 365 days a year via:
- Live chat
- Phone
Whenever I’ve contacted MaxCDN’s support, it’s been great.
It’s clear to see that their support agent’s really care about the experience their customers have. That’s rare.
Try MaxCDN for yourself (save 25%)
MaxCDN is an incredible CDN, whether you are a WordPress user or you use another CMS. I’ve had a fantastic experience with MaxCDN and I’m sure you will too.
Use the link below to save yourself 25% on MaxCDN services:
The post MaxCDN Review: Speed Up Your Site And Deliver An Incredible User Experience appeared first on WP Superstars.