When it comes to speed on the web, time is money in the most direct sense: a slower site means less traffic and lower sales for businesses. Yottaa, a Boston-based website performance company, today launched a content delivery network (CDN) designed to improve website speed for small and medium-sized businesses.

Yottaa’s patent-pending cloud-based technology accelerates delivery speeds, the company claims.

“Web pages today are increasingly complex; they are essentially distributed applications that span across the Internet, often requiring more than 100 round trips to distant servers and third-party domains,” said Yottaa CEO Coach Wei. “By combining patented cloud routing technology and real-time front-end optimization, Yottaa CDN adds the missing layer of intelligence to the Web. The result is websites that are 80 percent faster and far more resilient.”

Yottaa’s entrance into the CDN market puts it in competition with Akamai, the Cambridge-based content delivery giant. Yottaa is aiming to provide CDN services more cheaply, and is targeting small to mid-size businesses with its technology.

Prior to this announcement, Yottaa has focused on its front end web optimization technology, with its Site Speed Optimizer and Website Monitor product offerings.