How Bandwidth Affects Website Performance
For high traffic websites, bandwidth is one of the crucial factors that affect the websites’ performance. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred or downloaded from a website. It is defined in terms of number of bits per second (bps). There are variations of the measurement, including kilobits per second (Kbps), megabits per second (Mbps), or gigabits per second (Gbps). For example, 1Gbps is roughly 1000 Mbps which is 10 times faster than 100Mbps. The higher the bandwidth, the faster the data can be transferred, which also means the faster your website can load. If your website is not supported with sufficient bandwidth, it will take more time for your website to load completely and hurt your website performance. Even worse, your website might become unavailable to the visitors as you have reached the maximum limit of data allowed to be transmitted.
To calculate how much bandwidth you need, you should:
- Determine the average page size of your website in kilobytes (KB). You may use Pingdom speed test tool to help you find your average page size. Remember to look at some of your most popular pages to and take their average page size.
- Multiply the average page size in KB by the monthly average number of visitors to your website.
- Multiply the result from step 2 by the average number of page views per visitor.
The result you get from above is just the baseline for knowing the real bandwidth required for your website. It is important to allocate an extra room to grow and traffics spikes. Preferably, you should have at least 50% extra space for the traffic spikes. If you have users streaming online videos, downloading or uploading files on your website, you should further add up the average file size in your bandwidth calculation.
Some factors may influence your bandwidth, including:
- Layout changes: If you change your website layout, the size of your page may increase and take up more bandwidth and increase webpage loading time.
- Traffic flow: Websites with higher traffic require a higher amount of bandwidth for optimal website performance. The more your bandwidth, the more visitors your website can handle at the same time. Moreover, sometimes there may be unexpected traffic spikes that can cause bandwidth usage to double or evermore.
- Room to growth: when you have plans to expand your website content and traffic, or even add more domains within the next couple of years, you are suggested to opt for higher bandwidth packages to accommodate further growth spurts without incurring additional costs or suffering downtime.
If you find yourself are struggling with limited bandwidth, there are a few ways to reduce bandwidth usage of your website.
Optimize images: Large images consume more bandwidth and take longer time to load on web pages. You should reduce image file sizes using either a plugin or script, which in turn speeds up the load time of the page.
Enable browser caching: Browser caching captures information from your website and stores it. If someone visits your page again, the browser won’t have to download the static content all over again, which in turn reduces bandwidth consumption.
Host videos on external sites: Video file sizes are big. They can severely slow down your website and cause lag with your bandwidth. Instead of hosting videos on your website, upload them to YouTube and embed the videos into your web page. It helps keep the file size down and your page will load more quickly.
Remove unnecessary HTML code, tags and white spaces: Unused code contributes to the growth of web page size. Cutting them out is an effective way to improve overall website performance.
We offer 100Mbps dedicated international bandwidth and unmetered traffic for cPanel dedicated servers, which is suitable to host your high traffic websites. Each cPanel dedicated server comes with a cPanel Premier Metal Licenses (Up to 100 Accounts), giving you full administrative access to both WHM and cPanel. Ideal for any sized business to host their own websites, manage a portfolio of websites or even resell websites to others as a Reseller or Marketing Agency. Feel free to contact us by email at sales@dataplugs.com to learn more about our server plans.