How to Save Site Bandwidth

In 2021 global bandwidth usage reached 932 Tbit/s.

This increases every year, and will likely continue to do so in the future. These days, people rely on having a good internet connection, so using sites that drain bandwidth is something that people need to avoid.

Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted via the internet over a given timeframe measured in Mbps. If your site is wasting bandwidth, it will reduce load speeds for your users.

For some key tips on how to save site bandwidth, keep reading.

Turn On HTTP Compression

All websites involve text to some degree. This can be in the form of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more. If you enable HTTP compression you can reduce the amount of data used by the text by about two-thirds.

This is easy to do, and there's no reason to leave it out. Any text content that isn't compressed will increase people's bandwidth usage without providing any additional benefits.

Once you've reduced the amount of data used by the text on your site, you can move on to more advanced methods of bandwidth usage reduction.

Use an External Video Host

Hosting media on your website can use a lot of bandwidth, so it's better to host videos on another platform and embed them on your site as needed. Video content has become incredibly popular in recent years, so implementing it on your site could help increase engagement from users.

When talking about video hosting, most people will immediately think of YouTube video hosting, but that's not necessarily the best solution. It's not the fastest option available, so those with a slower connection may still experience issues.

Swarmify's SmartVideo platform offers the fastest video hosting in the world. Your customers will be able to watch videos embedded on your site without any buffering or playback issues. SmartVideo will also optimize videos for the device the viewer is using.

One major advantage over YouTube is that when a YouTube video is paused it will show related videos, and these could be videos from your competitors. Swarmify doesn't do this, so your customers' focus will be entirely on your brand and not be whisked away to another website.

Optimize and Compress Images

Much like videos, too many images can reduce page load speeds, so you don't want to overdo it. Avoid including unnecessary images, and where you choose to keep them, you should compress them. Compressing images is incredibly simple - there are plenty of free tools online you can use for this.

As discussed above, you can reduce the amount of bandwidth text uses through compression, and images tend to drain much more resources than text, so this is crucial. Beyond your website, this is also useful for things like email attachments as well as storage on your web server.

Another option that can be even more beneficial is external image hosting. There are plenty of platforms that allow image hosting, and they tend to be fairly inexpensive - some are even completely free. Just bear in mind that external image hosting can present various issues.

Some platforms have hard-coded bandwidth limits, so may not always be suitable. There might be terms of use restrictions that may limit the images you can host. Many of these hosting services are also blocked by corporate firewalls, so people may have trouble seeing the images when visiting your website.

Take these considerations into account when deciding how to use images on your site. You want to ensure all images are visible, and that they load as fast as possible.

Outsource Your RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are a useful way to provide clients with the latest content, and will automatically update at regular intervals. This will help your customers stay up to date and provides them with an easy way to see new posts on your website.

The downside here is that the amount of bandwidth that RSS readers use can be much larger than you might expect. Some websites have noted that their RSS feeds make up more than half of their bandwidth usage. How a reader is coded can cause bandwidth use to vary greatly, so it's important to get the code right.

One of the best ways to manage this is to outsource your RSS feed in the same way you would with video content or images. Like other media, this will display the same content on your page while reducing the amount of bandwidth being used.

Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header

Browsers and web proxies automatically cache data to increase load speeds. With an Expires header, web browsers can cache more static resources, further improving load speeds.

Expires headers are ideal for static resources such as images, scripts, and PDFs. By caching more resources, the number of HTML requests needed to load pages that have previously been visited is reduced.

Proxy caching allows a proxy server to cache resources. When a user visits your site their browser can download data from this proxy server, which is faster than downloading it from the source.

How to Save Site Bandwidth With Swarmify

Now that you know how to save site bandwidth, you need to make some decisions about how you'll proceed with it. Videos can be one of the most data-heavy elements of a website, so hosting these externally is crucial.

Swarmify is one of the best video hosting solutions available, and it's incredibly easy to use. We offer various plans to meet the needs of different businesses. Visit our pricing page to see our available plans today.