Bandwidth Reduction

Ways to achieve this

[IanTurner]

Bandwidth charges seem to be in at the present time so methods of bandwidth reduction have to be looked at by webmasters. Espcially those of us who are also SEOs driving traffic to our sites in quantities that 'should' be above the industry norm.

How can we achieve this.

1. Optimise images

An absolute must for most of us, then again we should be doing this as part of our every day work as we like sites that download quickly for the user.

2. HTTP Headers - Set expiry dates

Setting expiry dates is useful for reducing the load on your server as it will cause pages and content to be held in cache and not be downloaded at every request.

3. Remove redundant HTML

A lot of pages can benefit from improved performance by reducing the size of the HTML by the removal of redundant tags.

4. CSS

CSS can remove a lot of HTML tags if you implement it correctly. Keeping your classnames as short as possible will also help keep code size down to a minimum.

These come immediately to mind - are there any others that I have missed out?

[john316]

ban the bad bots

[brotherhood of LAN]

Just some smaller aspects that add up...

1. whitespace/spaces between html tags
2. length of urls...(thinking of those ones that span across the whole address bar)
3. robots.txt to keep some of the behaving spiders out of unwanted areas.
4. perhaps .htaccess/mod_rewrite (don't know much about these) to re-direct those bandwidth sucking bad spiders

[Mark_A]

Hi Ian
The items you mention are important but I think the single most important is simple ....

- Promote on focussed (low noise) key terms to tightly targetted users to maximise the ROI of bandwidth used.

- Assuming ROI is attractive - buy more bandwidth.

- Note if client assumes ROI is not attractive then redesign message and site until it is OR do NOT promote in first place.

[ukgimp]

1. External JS calls

2. Remove onMouseover buttons in favour of CSS buttons, may not be exactly what you want but you can get good results as I am sure you know.

[DaveN]

"get them in and get them out"

we took a website to the limit on the here's want you wanted now get out.

server side includes : style.css, menus.htm, footer.htm, right_nav.htm, etc etc

Get a host which does have bandwidth limits

DaveN

[sun818]

(301) Redirect from www.domain.com to domain.com.

remove all newlines. sacrifices readability for bandwidth savings. this includes your CSS formatting.

remove <!-- comment --> tags

remove <META tags>

[scotty]

Mod_Gzip or whatever compression technology between the web server and browsers... That helps quite a bit for HTML pages.

[onlineleben]

Good summaries on how to get your site fast and low on bandwidth can be found at webreference.com
Check out this [webreference.com]
and that [webreference.com] article.
These articles are about minimizing sites and html optimization.
Hope it is OK to post the URLs here.