CDN

A Content Delivery Network is a distributed network of servers that caches and serves your website's files from locations close to the user. Instead of every request traveling to a single origin server, a CDN serves assets from the nearest edge node, reducing latency and improving load times. Vercel, Cloudflare, and AWS CloudFront are popular CDN providers.

Think of it as opening local warehouses instead of shipping everything from one factory. If your server sits in Frankfurt and a customer browses from Lisbon or New York, every image and file would otherwise cross that whole distance on every visit. A CDN keeps copies at dozens of locations worldwide, so each visitor downloads from a server a short hop away. Distance is physics; a CDN is how you stop paying for it.

Why it matters for your project: if customers outside your city ever visit your site, a CDN is the cheapest speed upgrade available — often free at small-business scale, and typically included by modern hosting platforms rather than bought separately. It also absorbs traffic spikes (a newsletter feature, a viral post) that would strain a single server, and adds a resilience layer in front of your origin. The practical question for your developer is simply: "is this behind a CDN, and does it come with the hosting?"

CDNs pair especially well with static sites — SSG output is exactly the kind of pre-built file a CDN serves best, which is why that combination produces some of the fastest sites on the web. Your domain's DNS is what routes visitors to the CDN, and the payoff shows up directly in speed metrics like LCP.