How to reduce your website's bandwidth usage

There are many items that can impact website traffic. Most server measure this in Gigabytes (Gb)

Below are the common items:

• More visitors looking through your website
  • Every page on your website can have text, images and videos. Each of these are download when a visitor looks at the page.
  • For example a page has 4 images and 4 paragraphs it might be 1.2mb to view this page. This means that if you have 10 people looking at the page 1.2mb x 10 = 12mb, so an increase in visitors from 10 to 1000 would be 1.2mb x 1000 = 1200mb or 1.2Gb ot traffic.
• Oversized images (Optimise web page images)
  • Many programs that let you add content and images to your website, don't resize the image you upload.
  • For example: if you have a image that has dimension of 4000 x 2000 pixels and 2Mb in size) and you upload this but you only want to display the image 360 x 260 pixels. Unless you have used a image re-sizing program prior to uploading, the image will display at 360 x 260, but still have the dimensions of  4000 x 2000 and 2mb (2000Kb) in size.
  • If the image was resized down to 360 x 260 pixels, it would only be 23kbs.
  • This can have a knock on effect to the loading speed of your web page, if the images are large in size and the total web page is 8-10Mb in size to open instead of being 500Kb-2.5Mb
• Really long website pages
  • Example: You have to scroll 6-8 times on desktop to reach the bottom of the page. This would triple on mobile.
  • It means that you will probably have lots more images and text which can equal to 5-6Mb page size.
• Downloadable PDF files
  • If you have downloadable PDF files and these files are large or popular, they can also increase your traffic.
  • Each time the PDF is downloaded, this is extra traffic.
  • For example PDF file 8mb in size gets download 100 times 8mb x 100 = 800mb or .8Gb)
• FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
  • Transferring lots of files on and off the website.
• Email
  • If you are emailing with large images and/or documents
  • Email campaign (We suggest using Email services like Mailchimp, SendinBlue)
  • If you are using IMAP and you are connecting your email to several PCs, each time you connect it will sync the entire email structure and files
• Junk Traffic
  • Fake search engines.
  • Other companies scraping data from your website.
  • Counties and people that are paid to put reserve links.