The same website can feel instant in one country and sluggish in another. Often the culprit isn't your code — it's physics. Every byte has to cross the distance between your user and your origin server, and no amount of optimisation beats the speed of light.
A CDN — Content Delivery Network — puts cached copies of your content at edge locations around the world, so users are served from somewhere near them instead of from your single origin.
How a cache fills:
→ First request for an asset is a MISS. The edge fetches it from your origin and stores a copy.
→ Every subsequent request is a HIT. The edge serves its copy, and your origin never sees that request at all.
That second part is the one people underrate. A CDN doesn't just cut latency — it removes load from your origin entirely for cached content.
Getting started:
1. Point your DNS at the CDN provider
2. Set your cache rules
3. Verify what's actually being served from the edge (check the response headers)
Start with static assets — images, CSS, JavaScript — then tune from there.
Two honest limits:
✘ Not every asset is cacheable. Personalised pages, authenticated responses and anything with `Cache-Control: no-store` go to the origin every time. Your headers decide this, not the CDN.
✘ Not every request reaches the nearest edge. Routing depends on the provider's network, DNS resolution, PoP capacity and health. "Nearest" is a goal, not a guarantee.
And a CDN won't make every page faster. If your bottleneck is a slow database query on an uncacheable page, the edge can't help you — it'll still be slow, just closer.
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