To test whether a website can develop in the long term, its stability and access speed are very crucial indicators. If a website is built using an American server, as the number of website visitors or the content increases, the website's global access performance may be affected. Many webmasters choose to deploy a CDN (Content Delivery Network) on servers in the United States, which will help improve the website's access speed in different regions.
When using a US server, due to the geographical location and the long distance from the target access, problems such as network connection delay, packet loss, and slow loading may occur. Deploying a CDN can effectively solve the efficiency bottleneck of cross-border access. However, whether the actual effect of CDN acceleration is ideal and how to determine whether the deployment is successful are unavoidable issues in operation. This article will systematically elaborate on the acceleration principle, effect manifestation and judgment methods after the deployment of CDN on American servers, helping users scientifically evaluate their deployment results and improve the overall website performance.
The fundamental purpose of deploying a CDN is to achieve the local distribution of content. Although American servers are powerful in performance, have sufficient bandwidth and are relatively affordable, if users are concentrated in Asia, Europe or other non-North American regions, directly loading resources from American servers will affect the access experience due to network path latency caused by physical distance. By caching the static resources of the website (such as images, JS, CSS, videos, etc.) to the global nodes of the CDN, when users access, the content is retrieved from the nearest node, significantly reducing latency, improving response speed, and simultaneously alleviating the pressure on the source site, preventing server crashes or bandwidth exhaustion due to concurrent access.
Whether CDN acceleration is effective or not should first be judged from the changes in page loading speed. Before and after deployment, speed testing tools can be used to conduct access tests on the homepage and key pages of the website, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom, WebPageTest, etc. The core indicators focused on in the test include first byte time (TTFB), total page loading time, and the download speed of static resources, etc.
Secondly, whether the CDN is working properly can also be reflected from the user access logs. After deploying the CDN, most user requests should be processed by the CDN nodes. Only when the cache misses or specific rules skip the cache will they be returned to the main server in the United States. The hit rate, bandwidth usage and request distribution can be viewed through the log statistics function of the CDN console. The higher the hit rate is, the more reasonable the cache configuration of the CDN is, and the resource reuse is sufficient, effectively reducing the load of the source station and the pressure of data transmission. If the hit rate remains persistently low, it is necessary to check whether the caching strategy is set correctly, such as whether the caching control header is enabled and whether most resource caching is excluded.
Thirdly, the effect of the CDN can also be judged by analyzing the changes in the source traffic of the server. After the successful deployment of the CDN, the traffic of the source station should decrease significantly, especially the proportion of static resource bandwidth should drop markedly. If the average bandwidth consumption of the source station before deploying the CDN is 100Mbps and drops to 20Mbps or even lower after deployment, it indicates that the CDN has successfully shared most of the traffic pressure. Conversely, if there is no significant change in the source traffic, it is necessary to verify whether the CDN has enabled full-site acceleration, whether it takes effect on the correct domain name, and whether caching rules for static resources have been set, etc.
The performance changes of CDN are also reflected in the stability of global user access. Since CDN nodes generally have the ability to resist attacks and possess functions such as automatic disaster recovery, intelligent routing and link optimization, they can alleviate the problems of network fluctuations or unstable access in the target area.
Furthermore, from an SEO perspective, the deployment of a CDN may also have a positive impact on the crawling speed of search engine crawlers. When search engine crawlers are crawling web page content, they may reduce the crawling frequency or even stop indexing due to the slow response of the website. After optimizing the website response speed through CDN, crawlers can more easily complete content crawling, which is conducive to the improvement of search engine indexing and ranking. After deployment, the changes in the crawl time in the "Crawl Statistics" can be viewed through the Google Search Console. If the average crawl time decreases significantly, it can also serve as an indirect confirmation of the improvement in the CDN effect.
From the perspective of operational security, CDN also has advantages in terms of protection. Many CDN service providers have built-in basic protection functions that can prevent direct threats to the source site such as DDoS attacks, CC attacks, and malicious crawlers. After deployment, the source station IP will be hidden behind the CDN, and most access requests will no longer expose the real server address, reducing the possibility of direct attacks.
Of course, judging the deployment effect of CDN also needs to be analyzed in combination with the actual business requirements. For websites that rely on real-time interaction or frequent changes in dynamic content (such as social platforms and financial trading systems), the effect of CDN on dynamic acceleration may not be as obvious as that on static resources. When deploying, advanced functions such as edge dynamic caching and intelligent sourcing need to be enabled. For blogs, enterprise official websites, download sites and the like that mainly display static content, the effect of CDN is more significant, and the improvement in response speed and the saving of bandwidth are more easily detectable.
In conclusion, whether there is an acceleration effect after the successful deployment of CDN for a US server website can be comprehensively judged from multiple dimensions such as page loading speed, cache hit rate, changes in bandwidth and traffic, access stability, SEO crawl feedback, and security protection effect. The deployment of CDN should be combined with the actual business requirements and technical indicators, and the caching strategy and acceleration rules should be constantly adjusted to ensure that the acceleration advantages of CDN are truly exerted.
