Tap Into the Benefits of an Ecommerce CDN

CDN stands for content distribution network, which is a worldwide system of servers that all contain a copy of your site content. When a customer comes to your site and CDN is enabled, they'll access the site content via the server that is geographically closest to them. For example, a shopper in New York will receive your content from a server near New York, while a shopper in London will receive your content from a server near London.

This technology is possible thanks to our partnership with Akamai, a leading CDN provider that powers ecommerce giants like Apple, Staples, Land's End, QVC and Overstock.com. Volusion is providing you with this cutting-edge technology free of charge.

Akamai's content distribution network is made up of over 95,000 high speed servers spread out across 72 countries. Throughout the day, a copy of your website content is automatically published from Volusion's data center to all 95,000+ CDN servers. When an online shopper visits your store, your content will be delivered from the CDN server that is closest to their current location via the fastest, most reliable path.

The biggest benefit of using a CDN is improved load time for your site, which Volusion CDN can increase by up to 60%. Since a shopper's proximity to a server impacts load time, or site speed, having your site content copied across multiple servers around the world helps your pages load faster for customers.

Simply put, the faster your site speed, the better. This is true for a number of reasons, including:

• Enhanced SEO: Google and other major search engines have announced that site speed is a factor for how your pages rank in search engines. Since the CDN provides faster site speed, your pages have an additional advantage for search engine rankings.
• Improved User Experience: Shoppers clearly prefer faster sites over slower ones, so having a site that loads quickly creates an improved shopping experience. The Volusion CDN gives you a better chance of keeping customers on your site longer while helping them visit more pages.
• Crash Protection: Your site content is now mirrored from our datacenter to over 95,000 CDN servers. If any of these CDN servers, or even the broader Internet backbone, has more load than desirable, the system automatically reroutes traffic to the next closest server with the highest availability and performance. This ensures that your customers are routed around congestion, latency, and hardware failures.

All functions performed within your store's admin will be routed directly to our datacenter, which means that you'll continue to experience regular site performance within your admin. It's also important to note that your storefront will load at normal speeds while you're logged in as an admin. To see how your storefront performs using CDN, you'll need to first log out of your admin area.

Absolutely not. We're providing you this exciting new feature completely free of charge.

Right now! If you're on the latest software version, V13, you can enable this functionality by following the instructions provided in this Knowledge Base article. If you're on a previous version, you'll need to upgrade.

CDN comes automatically enabled on your store. To turn it off, please see this Knowledge Base article.

Volusion CDN is only available to stores using V13. If you're currently on a previous version, you'll need to upgrade to V13 to utilize this new feature.

Overall, Volusion CDN will benefit your search engine optimization efforts thanks to improvements in site speed, which Google states is a factor in page rankings. One thing to know is that the URL for each of your product images will change, which could have an impact on any SEO specific to your product images. Please note that all other SEO efforts/settings will remain completely unaffected.

No. The CDN has no impact on any analytics or sales data.

Yes, you can enable any of your stores that are on V13 of our software. Keep in mind that you'll need to individually enable CDN for each of your stores.