Website owners frequently worry about high bandwidth usage, and it can be irritating to see a lot of bandwidth being used.
In this blog, we will discuss the possible causes of high bandwidth usage and also explore feasible solutions to improve the efficiency of your website.
- Spiders and Bots
Serarch engine bots like Google, Bing crawl your website for indexing purpose. These bots follow the instructions specified in the robots.txt file. But sometimes, these search engine bots crawl your website frequently and it can lead to excessive bandwidth usage.How do I know bots are using my account’s bandwidth?
You can check the statistics available in Awstats which gives real-time statistics related to the traffic on your website.
Awstats provides specific information about which known and unknown spiders and bots are visiting your website and how much data (bandwidth) has been transferred as a result. You can also find the IPs of these bots and search spiders in Awstats; If you want to block a specific IP or IP range.
How can I stop bots from repeatedly crawling my website?
In case of Google, you can contact them about this and they will reduce the time Google’s bots crawl your website which will reduce the bandwidth you lose due to frequent crawling of your website. But other crawlers such as Baidu, the Chinese search engine, are known to consume significant bandwidth due to frequent crawling.
We’ve had complaints from customers about search spiders for the Baidu search engine crawling their websites causing a huge loss of bandwidth – and if you do a search on this, it’s a problem for many webmasters.
However, for search engines like Baidu, you may need to consider blocking their IP range or the entire country if other measures before do not work.
- Optimising Images
Higher resolution and uncompressed images also use more bandwidth. These types of images can take a long time for your webpage to load and require high bandwidth. So, we would like to suggest you to optimize and compress the image without compromising the image quality. This will significantly improve loading times and also help reduce bandwidth usage.
You can use free software tools to compress images. For Mac, you can use ImageOptim. For Linux , use Trimage (also available in the Ubuntu Software Centre). However, there are plenty of web-based utilities that do the same thing.
- Compressing your CSS and JavaScript codeWell, it won’t give you the most effective savings, it’s “every little bit helps”. There are free online tools you can use that compress your CSS code by removing all unnecessary whitespace from your CSS selectors, properties, and property values. Similarly, JavaScript code is compressed in a similar manner.
Both techniques can save you a huge chunk of bandwidth, especially if you have a high-traffic website. - Using Minified jQueryIf you use the jQuery library, always use the minified version. It is similar to the full version but is much smaller in size as it is essentially compressed. If you don’t want to waste bandwidth having the jQuery library on your server, then take advantage of being able to use Google’s, Microsoft’s, or jQuery’s hosted jQuery library through their content delivery network.
Conclusion
Finding the reasons for high bandwidth usage is important to making your website perform better. By implementing the above factors you can effectively control the bandwidth usage. We always recommend that regular maintenance keeps your website running smoothly and provides a better user experience
Also Read : How to Track Your Website’s Analytics and Performance
