Tips and Tricks for Saving Bandwidth

By Ashish Monga

If you have a hosting package where bandwidth is a constraint and your budget is limited, it’s vital to make sure you take all possible measures to save as much bandwidth as you possibly can. Even if you have plenty of bandwidth, and a fast growing website it can help to optimise your website to save bandwidth. Here are some tips and techniques you can use to save bandwidth.

1. Using a Robots.Txt : A robots.txt file can be used to instruct search engine bots to not index specified pages of your websites. This can be extremely helpful, especially on websites with a large amount of content, which is not unique. A perfect example would be profile pages of an online forum.
   
2. Gzip Compression : This refers to compressing your pages before sending them to the users. For this to work, it is important that the user’s browser supports Gzip compression. Most modern browsers support Gzip compression.
   
3. Set up a Local host : Instead of downloading and uploading files after making changes again and again (for testing purposes), it is better to install a local host and first the test the files before uploading them. This not only saves bandwidth but would also help to make sure, that the files are tested and working before actually uploading them, and hence not interfere with user experience.
   
4. Compress Images : Compressing .jpeg and .gif images can be really handy and can actually help save a lot of bandwidth, especially if you have a lot of images on your website.
   
5. External hosting of Images : An alternative to compressing images, could actually be hosting them externally. There are lots of websites, which allow you to host images on them for free. Many of them don’t have any image size limit, so you could actually preserve the quality of the images, and at the same time save valuable bandwidth.
   
6. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) : Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is also a useful way of saving bandwidth. It is designed to decrease HTML file size by attributing values for any HTML element/command at the beginning of the document.
   
7. Moving JavaScript to external files : If you use a lot of JavaScript on your website you could actually consider moving those to external files. They will get cached and give off the appearance of faster loading to users.
   
8. Crawl Delay : Another effective way of stopping robots from eating up your bandwidth is using crawl delay in your robots.txt file. This special directive is used to reduce the speed at which the crawlers make requests to your website.
   
9. Flash, Sound & Video Files : Flash files can take up a lot of bandwidth, and hence it is imperative to make them smaller. To make the size of your flash files smaller, you can use action script v1 support in macromedia flash. It is advisable not to use sound and video at all, unless really needed, not only because of bandwidth issues but also because it can be irritating for some users as it may interfere with something else they may be listening to while browsing. Although if you do intend to use it, make sure you use smaller file formats such as wma.

Choosing a Host
- Finding a Good Web Host
- How to save money on hosting
- Free Hosting Vs Paid Hosting
- Choosing an Ideal Web Hosting Company
- How much bandwidth is ideal for your website?

Hosting
- Tips and Tricks for Saving Bandwidth
- Hosting Reseller

Web Developement
- Understanding and Analysing Website Traffic
- Writing your own Web Content
- Improving Your Google Rankings

- Get the Right Keywords
- Marketing over Web Development

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