Are there SEO benefits of hosting on a CDN?

Today, websites are becoming more and more rich and complex in their content. Numerous JavaScript and CSS files, videos, images are hosted on the site’s server to create a rich and engaging user experience for visitors. The solution could be to use a CDN.

CDNs do not host your entire content or website, but only help cache page components such as images or videos to speed up the speed at which they load.

 

Does using a CDN improve rankings?

A CDN is an external service provider in addition to your web server, which hosts your files such as videos, software, java scripts and more. When embedded in your CMS, media files, for example, are displayed from an external source, instead of from your website. This makes the website much “lighter”, which certainly affects the loading speed. And until recently, the importance of using a CDN for SEO was not questioned.

CDNs are essentially a network of geographically distributed servers that cache website content, thereby storing a copy of the website in multiple data centers around the world. When a user requests a page from a website, the request hits the nearest CDN node, and the content is served from the cached content from the CDN. The closer the server is to the visitor, the fewer “hops” the website has to make to reach that visitor. Thus, the loading speed decreases, and a good user experience increases.

However, is it really necessary for your website to use a CDN? The answer to this question was tried to be given by John Muller from Google in SEO-office hours.

 

The question that was asked is:

“Does hosting a website on a CDN improve rankings?”

We get most of our traffic from a specific country. We have placed our website on a server located in that country.

Do you suggest we put our entire website on a CDN to improve page speed for users worldwide or is it not necessary in our case? “

 

CDN has no SEO effect

Mueller replied that CDN has no SEO effect.

He said:

 

” So obviously you can do a lot of these things.

I don’t think it would have much of an impact on Google at all in terms of SEO. “

While Mueller says he doesn’t think it would have much of an effect, he returns to this point and clarifies it:

” The only effect I see that might make sense is what users end up seeing.

And, as you mentioned, if most of your users are already ́ seeing a very fast website because your server is located there, then you’re kind of doing the right thing.

But of course, if users in other locations are getting very slow results, because maybe the connection to your country isn’t that great, then that’s something you should improve.

And you should look at that in the context that, of course, if your website is really slow for other users, users are going to visit your website less and less because the experience is going to be frustrating

Whereas if your website is quite fast for other users, then they should have the opportunity to see a reasonably fast website…

So from that point of view, if there’s anything you can do to improve things globally for your website, I think it’s a good idea.

Otherwise, I don’t think it’s a critical issue. “

Mueller then returned to the issue of SEO and this time addressed the issue of indexing and the benefits of CDNs.

 

Mueller continued his response:

” It’s not something that’s important in terms of SEO, in the sense that Google has to see the site as very fast or anything like that.

But it is something you can do to optimize your website for your country.

Maybe one thing I should clarify, if Google’s crawling is really, really slow, then of course it can affect how much we can crawl and index from the website.

So that might be an aspect to consider.

Most of the sites I’ve looked at, I haven’t really seen this as a problem with any of them that don’t have millions and millions of pages.

So, from that point of view, you can double check how fast Google is crawling in Search Console in crawl stats.

And if it seems reasonably fast, even if it’s not super fast, then I wouldn’t really worry about it. “

Given that a slow web server can significantly affect the speed with which the website is loaded, and especially the TTFB parameter, which is quite important for Google ‘s ranking, it is certainly not bad to consider every possibility that can help improve the site’s performance.

However, as we could see, Mueller ‘s answer indicates that there is no SEO effect from using a CDN. There are many good reasons to use a CDN, but SEO is not one of them, concludes Mueller .

 

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Source: Google SEO-office hours