Ways To Minimize Bandwidth Usage
The best way to avoid excessive server resource usage is to minimize your website’s bandwidth usage. This can usually be achieved by doing any one or several of the following methods:
Minimize image sizes
Minimizing the size of your images, whether by resizing, cropping, or altering quality settings, will result in a direct decrease in bandwidth. You could even consider using an external image provider such as Imageshack, Photobucket or Flickr or an online image compressor like Optzilla.
Use caching
Caching is the storing of copies of web documents to enable quicker access to files for subsequent use. When a user visits your website, certain elements such as images, style sheets and external JavaScript files are cached. This means that a repeat visitor does not download the complete web page, but only elements of the page which haven’t been already cached.
Don’t allow user uploads
Don’t allow your blog readers, forum users or website visitors to upload their own photos and videos.
Protect your site from getting hacked
A hacked website can be the cause of a lot of extra resource usage on the server because a malicious code typically tries to process multiple things for each page load on top of what a normal website already does. To find out more about hacked websites, visit this article.
Reduce amount of plugins or modules
Before installing a plugin or module, consider researching it on Google to make sure there are no known issues with the script. It’s also advisable to always keep your plugins updated. Outdated plugins can cause excessive server usage and also leave your website open to hackers and malware, which could also result in server usage overages.
Optimizing inefficient scripts
By removing whitespace and by simplifying the code of your dynamic files, you will also notice bandwidth savings. If you don’t have much technical experience with editing the code of your website, we advise against trying to minimize your bandwidth usage this way.
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