How to Save Website and Server Bandwidth

Anyone with a website or blog should be interested in learning how to save bandwidth for a few different reasons. For one, maximizing your bandwidth by using less on your website or blog is helpful because you are able to save money on your web hosting costs. To upgrade your web hosting account to get more space and bandwidth, you are going to have to pay more money each month on your plan. If you use some of these helpful tips on how to save bandwidth with your online blog or website, you can save money overall. Also, the more bandwidth you use, the more time it is going to take for your website to load. A slow-to-load website is often an unpopular website because no one wants to spend extra minutes they don’t have on a website that takes forever to load each individual page. Do yourself and your website a favor by learning these ways how to save bandwidth on your website so you can ensure a successful website and web hosting experience.

How to Save Bandwidth:

To start, it is important to realize how much certain parts of your website are taking up bandwidth. Photos, audio and video tools and many more of these features on your website look cool and add a creative and functional look to your website. However, these images, videos and other awesome features can greatly slow your website down. While it is important to want to draw your readers in with a few colorful pictures, and or video options, you don’t want to overdo it. If you do plan on having a photo/video heavy website, you will want to make sure and choose a web hosting plan that is able to accommodate for the bandwidth level a website like this will require. If you use your website to run an online store, this is going to guarantee that you will need to choose a web hosting plan to accommodate more bandwidth or you will risk having your website run incredibly slow. You want to be able to show off your products and services via picture or even video. Simply make sure you have the bandwidth to accommodate this. However, don’t feel like all of your pictures have to be huge. You can opt to compress your images using JPG and PNG. This is a good way you can compress your images, but still keep them big enough to showcase on your website. You can use a photo editing program like Photoshop to accomplish this task and get the photos compressed so you can still use them on your website without taking up tons of bandwidth.

You might also want to consider compressing your CSS files as a way to learn how to save bandwidth. You can get rid of the unnecessary breaks and spaces when you use a CSS compressor tool from arantius.com or isnoop.net as a way to downsize your CSS files. You can also do a similar method to downsize your HTML files that might be taking up too much bandwidth. You can use a program like GZIP compression if you have a PHP website. This is a great way to trim down the file size of your HTML files.

This is also a good opportunity to clean up your HTML code by leaving comments out of your source code, which means less file size you have to transfer thereby saving on your bandwidth space. Another tip to remember for those wanting to learn how to save bandwidth for their website or blog is to learn how to trim down filenames and locations. You can use a super simple technique to accomplish this bandwidth saving technique. Simply change the folder and filenames to a smaller word or character name. It can be difficult to manage your files this way, so make sure you keep it as descriptive as possible while still trying to keep the name small to save on bandwidth.

There are a few other tips you might want to consider as well on the topic of how to save bandwidth for your blog or website. You might want to use external sources to cache your RSS feed. This is a great way to save on bandwidth. If you aren’t necessarily concerned with attracting tons of web traffic, you might want to consider using some webmaster tools to block your website from the search engine bots that typically crawl around websites to get search engine rankings. This isn’t the best option if you want to attract a bigger following. However, if you just use your website for personal use and don’t care if you have a lot of followers, you can block it from the search engine bots, and you can also make it so it is members only. This is especially popular to do with some blogs. If you have a blog that you want to only share with close family and friends make sure you have it set to private so that your readers will need a password to access your site.

Overall, there are these ways you can use to learn how to save bandwidth. However, with so many cheap and affordable web hosting companies available, it might be more worth it to simply upgrade your web hosting plan so you can accommodate more bandwidth space and web traffic on your website. There are tons of cheap and even free web hosting companies that continually work to offer customers great web hosting packages with even unlimited bandwidth space. Find a web host like this that is able to fulfill your web hosting needs.