With or without CDN?

[guillameLK]

Hi there
I'm building a website for a local businesss, a Dental Clinic

It's a relative small city so most of my traffic will come from fb/google ads and some SEO. I already bought a good hosting plan from a company which they have servers in that city.

I'm trying to do a good score on google mobile and I was wondering if it's worth to add a CDN considering 99% of that traffic will be local
What do you guys think? Should I add cdn just for a better the score?

 

[TheVigilante]

No need to add CDN you should be fine without it

 

[Roger Marquez]

I'm building a website for a local businesss, a Dental Clinic

It's a relative small city so most of my traffic will come from fb/google ads and some SEO. I already bought a good hosting plan from a company which they have servers in that city.

I'm trying to do a good score on google mobile and I was wondering if it's worth to add a CDN considering 99% of that traffic will be local
What do you guys think?

It highly depends on the physical location of the servers where your site is being hosted and the speed of those servers.

For example, take a look at Cloudflare's data center location in the world...

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Now, assuming the worse that you have a crappy hosting provider with servers located on the west coast and your local business is located on the east coast. I would still set up a Cloudflare account.

I know some might feel this is overkill but if this means improving my site´s performance in 200ms, I don´t see any issues why you shouldn´t do it. Considering Cloudflare´s offers a free plan that will give you access to these data centers.

If, on the other hand, your site is hosted on robust and fast servers, then yeah. Setting up a CDN won´t be necessary.

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Should I add cdn just for a better the score?

You should add a CDN if your site is hosted on a bad/lousy server just to unload some of the burdens it applies to it. Especially by caching and serving static resources. You will be improving the usage of the bandwidth provided by your hosting company.

Alternatively, CDNs also offer an extra layer of security to your site. So, it´s not just about performance.

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[VibroHeavenUK]

I use Cloudflares free plan and noticed a big difference in page speed load, apparently people expect a webpage to load in so many milliseconds (can't remember what the exact figure is) anything after that you supposedly loose customers.

As its free and adds an extra layer of protection, why not?

 

[LinkJar]

CDN reduces latency and provides a faster loading of your website. CDNs not only ensure a faster experience to your users, but they also help to prevent site crashes in the event of traffic surges – CDNs help to distribute bandwidth across multiple servers, instead of allowing one server to handle all traffic.

See : https://www.keycdn.com/blog/why-use-a-cdn
It shows you more details about why use a cdn .

See : https://www.sitepoint.com/7-reasons-not-to-use-a-cdn/
It shows you 7 reasons not to use a content delivery network .

Hope this helps !

 

[guillameLK]

No need to add CDN you should be fine without it

Thanks buddy
you're actually the only one who actually read what I had posted not only the title
the others just posted to increase posts and promote signature lol

 

[speedy5044]

cloudflare , they have a lot of datacenters + they really speed your website up

 

[Bmnro]

Interesting thread, I personally noticed a drop in rank after sticking a website behind cloudflare. I'm curious to know how Google identifies the location of the web server when it's behind cloudflare. If I do a basic lookup of a website we host I get results saying it's in Australia (good - this is what we want), if I put it behind cloudflare then the same lookup tells me the website is hosted in the US. It says US because the website I am doing the lookup from is no doubt in the US so it hits the nearest CloudFlare POP. I wonder if this harms your rank because Google does most of its crawling from the US (based on research I have done) and therefore I assume it thinks our websites are hosted in the US (not good when we are in Australia).

We proved that the location of web server makes a big difference. Hosting on high spec web server in Australia and then moved it to same high spec vm in Singapore - then back to Aus. We did it gradually back and forth over the course of several months and it seems to make a significant difference. I am now very wary of CloudFlare and agree with posts above - depends on what host you have, depends on where you are located geographically.

 

[Danezz]

If you have hosting in your city, you don't need any cdn. Mobile loading times is always a bit slower, it's better to improve the code

 

[Dopious]

With a server in the same city, don´t use a CDN, it slows your website down to the local visitors.

 

[xReminisce]

With a server in the same city, don´t use a CDN, it slows your website down to the local visitors.

add bypass to certain locations
But I do overall agree, for local websites, you should be looking at local hosting and unless you choose something completely trash, they are sufficient for most use cases.

Interesting thread, I personally noticed a drop in rank after sticking a website behind cloudflare.

Out of how many sites? Just 1? How can you be sure it was because of cloudflare?
I personally have a Cloudflare Enterprise on some of my sites using GCP host and they rank just fine.
While other sites of mine use Cloudflare Basic (Free) as a DNS point only while using BunnyCDN.

FYI, changing host do have a potential to impact your site's rankings, especially since it does take hours and can be days for DNS to fully propagate across.
This is why "uptime" is so important.

Hi there
I'm building a website for a local businesss, a Dental Clinic

Depends highly on your site itself.
How does it already score on GPageSpeed Insights?
Is the website itself heavy that you need another datacenter to offload some of it's task to display your site faster to your customers?

As mentioned before, Local Sites using good local hosting is usually more than enough.

 

[Loklush]

It's a relative small city so most of my traffic will come from fb/google ads and some SEO. I already bought a good hosting plan from a company which they have servers in that city.

If you buy server from same city and your paid visitor is coming from same city then don't need to buy any CDN

If you want to buy CDN then you can buy bunny CDN its way to cheaper than Cloudflare