Will using CDN Affect SEO?

[Consult1901]

I'm got a website with a slider and each of the 6 slides has a 5-second video background.  The website is B2B and the user profile for the website is employees at Fortune 1000 companies in the United States using desktop computers to browse.  The videos are highly optimized and we did testing using various browsers and bandwidth connections to determine the videos loaded fast enough on down to a 15mbit/s connection (which is pretty low by today's average U.S. business bandwidths.)

We tried hosting the videos on Vimeo and YouTube but it caused issues in the timing of the slide show display.  (I've not seen any other website do what we do the way we do it.  Most sites have a single video background with a single text overlay on top.)

The downside to this is that loading all those videos produces a lot of bandwidth usage for our server.  The website is serving a niche service industry though so we're not exceeding our current limits.

I'm wondering though might there be some benefit to hosting just the video files on a CDN?  Obviously that would mean lest bandwidth usage for our server, and possibly quicker load times where the CDN server is closer to the user than our server.  But are there benefits or downsides from an SEO perspective noting that I'm proposing only putting the videos on the CDN, not the entire web page.

[jasongmcmahon]

The quicker your site loads the more rewarded you'll be - SEO wise, but, read the fine print when you research for a service provider, beware of any mention of down-times! This could be detrimental.

My first step would be to optimise the video, see if/ how that speeds things up.

[TimHolmes]

In theory as per Joe using a CDN can certainly influence your site speed load, however I found their are a few caveats to this.

Firstly are you serving content in the same country/content to your audience and does your CDN have a node in this location to allow a faster pull of content. The speed gain may only be helped if this is the case.

Second, can your CDN serve content via SSL be it an installed or shared SSL.

And can your CDN serve via HTTP2 for simultaneous loading of files in parallel with one another. All of this can certainly affect your SEO, but hopefully the gains are enough to actually have a positive influence.

For Videos - my favourite is still actually Youtube, it can boost your own following and don't forget Youtube is the second largest search engine that I am aware of. Hosting and having content here can only be an added benefit.

Cheers Tim