Your site, copied next door
Distance is latency: a request from Sydney to a server in Frankfurt crosses the planet twice before the first byte renders, and no server tuning changes the speed of light. A CDN attacks the geography instead. Its edge locations — hundreds of small server clusters near population centers — hold cached copies of your content; visitors are routed to the nearest one via DNS or network-level addressing, and only requests the edge can't answer travel on to your origin.
Static assets — images, scripts, stylesheets, fonts, video — are the natural cargo, and entire pre-rendered pages qualify too, which is why static-site setups often serve every visitor from the edge and touch the origin only at deploy time. Beyond speed, the CDN absorbs: traffic spikes and volumetric DDoS attacks hit a global network built for exactly that, not your single web server. Modern CDNs bundle TLS, image optimization and serverless code at the edge, drifting from cache toward platform.
A CDN accelerates; it doesn't replace
Dynamic, personalized responses still come from your application, and cache misses still reach your origin. A slow origin behind a CDN is a slow site with good first impressions — caching strategy and origin performance remain your work.