How Your Web Development Team Can Minimise Your Bandwidth Usage

Does your website regularly exceed the daily or even monthly bandwidth allotments that have been given to you by your web host? When this happens, do they charge you over usage fees or restrict access to your site? Regardless of which of these penalties your website is forced to wear, neither of them are overly desirable. If your site is experiencing this problem or you fear that it might, you should contact your web development team and ask them how they can minimise your bandwidth usage.

There are actually a number of ways that they can work towards minimizing how much of your bandwidth you are using, the most obvious being to reduce the load that your website puts on the server. Your web development team can achieve this by doing a number of things:

• Minimizing the size of your images;
• Optimizing inefficient scripts;
• Taking advantage of caching; and
• Generating static files from dynamic content.

Whilst the first two points are fairly self explanatory (at least, to anyone who has any experience with web development), it is the final two that may pose some further investigating.

Caching is the act of storing copies of your web documents so that they can be accessed more quickly. Whilst websites already do some caching (when a user visits your site, for example, some images, style sheets and external JavaScript files are cached on their computer. This means that, when they revisit the site, these features will be loaded immediately). Your web development team should be able to control which files are being cached, as well as outlining how long they should be cached for.

Generating static files, on the other hand, is the act of selecting pages that don’t change very often and making them become static. Whenever changes are made, you can have your system set up so that these new pages will replace the old ones or they can be updated at pre-scheduled intervals. The drawback of this point, however, is that users will experience a delay when pages are being updated, which could cause some impatience.

Whilst it doesn’t really matter which of the above points your web development team chooses to use in a bid to minimise your bandwidth usage, it is important that they execute it perfectly to ensure that it is successful. In many respects, utilising two or even three of the above points can be the ideal way of ensuring that your website doesn’t exceed its bandwidth, leaving you with costly fees or even loading delays.