# CDN

A CDN is a network of servers around the world that keeps copies of your website, so it loads from a place near whoever is visiting.

Source: https://ibenta.no/en/glossary/cdn
Publisher: Ibenta (https://ibenta.no)
Updated: 2026-09-27

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Without a CDN, your website sits on one server, in one place. Visitors in Tromsø and in Tokyo fetch everything from there. With a CDN, images, scripts and often whole pages are copied to many servers in different places, and each visitor gets the files from the nearest one. That saves time on every single file.

## Does it help a local business?

If all your customers are in Norway and your server is in Norway, the speed gain is smaller than for an online store selling to all of Europe. But a CDN does more than shorten the distance. Many requests are answered from the copies and never reach your server, so a traffic spike is easier to handle. Many CDNs also filter out attacks and bots. That is good for your [uptime](/en/glossary/uptime).

It does not have to cost anything either. [Cloudflare has a free plan](https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/free/) that includes CDN, SSL and protection against DDoS attacks.

## Ask, then measure

Ask whoever runs your website: is the site behind a CDN, and if so, which one? If the answer is no, ask why. It is worth measuring your [page speed](/en/glossary/page-speed) with Google's free PageSpeed Insights before and after a change, so you can see whether it actually helped.