VPN
Website and technology
Website and technology
A VPN (virtual private network) routes your internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a server elsewhere, making it harder to intercept and making sites see that server's IP address instead of yours.
For websites you mainly use a VPN to see what a visitor elsewhere sees. Pick a server in Belgium, Germany or the US and you can check how your site behaves for that country: which language version appears, whether redirects are right, whether prices and currency are correct, and whether the cookie notice works as intended.
It also helps with search results and ads. Results vary by location, so a VPN gives an impression of what people see abroad — an impression, not a measurement. For reliable numbers use Search Console, a rank tracker with a country setting or the ad preview tool, not your own browser.
It is useful too on public wifi, for reaching an environment locked to a fixed office IP, and for testing geoblocking or geographic targeting.
Mind the side effects while testing: your traffic appears to come from another country, you can pollute A/B tests and analytics if you do not exclude yourself, some tools demand extra verification, and speed measurements become unreliable because traffic takes a detour.
In practice
Treating a VPN as proof. What you see through a German server is your session, with your language settings and history — verify important conclusions with Search Console, analytics or a testing tool.
Related terms
- Local SEOLocal SEO is being findable for searches with a location or a 'near me' intent, both in regular results and in the map block.
- HreflangHreflang is the annotation that tells search engines which page belongs to which language or region, so they show the right version.
- A/B testIn an A/B test you show two versions of a page or element to comparable groups of visitors and measure which performs better on one predefined goal.
- SSLAn SSL certificate (technically TLS these days) encrypts traffic between visitor and server. You recognise it by https in the address bar.