Left to get away with every sales pitch, every website would have every trick in the book thrown at it to squeeze out an extra tenth of a second of performance by every website developer but do all websites need to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?
The honest answer is “not necessarily” and very likely “no”.
Do you host your website in the same country or region that your customers are in? If so, a CDN won’t do much for your website.
A Content Delivery Network improves website load time by (in simplified terms) making a duplicate of some content (CSS files, Javascript files, images) and putting those files on different servers around the world so that they are served from the website user’s nearest CDN server.
If your market, your customers and your website are all in the same region (ie the UK) then a CDN won’t be helping anything more than caching will do.
However, if you sell a product or service that can be delivered to anyone anywhere in the world then. CDN can help.
Most good website hosting companies now include some level of content caching which, combined with ‘browser caching’ and ‘future expires’ set, you can actually achieve good website performance (on a decent host) with little effort or costly additional extras.
If you do need a CDN, there are so many options so choose one that fits your budget and frequently test your load speeds using GTMetrix, PingDom and Google’s own PageSpeed Insights.