Most bloggers don’t really think much about bandwidth. If they use a free service like Blogger.com or HomeschoolBlogger.com there’s no financial motivation to minimize bandwidth so it’s never really occured to them to bother with it.
Today I’d like to discuss several reasons to be concerned about it, then in the next few days discuss solutions.
Well, first, there is the financial part. If you want your blog to grow you’ll eventually have enough traffic that any host will start grumbling about the bandwidth use, if they haven’t already, and you’ll find yourself scrambling to pay for it as wondering how you can reduce it.
Another problem is page size, which of course becomes a bandwidth problem.
Go to the home page of your blog and look at the code (In IE: View>>Source, in Chrome: right click>>View Page Source). Now copy all of the code and put it into a editor that can do a text count (Eric Fookes’ wonderful NoteTab does this. I use it almost exclusively as my plain text editor). That text count is going to be the initial bandwidth your blog will use just for that page. It will also have images and other files, too, but for now let’s just worry about this page.
If the letter count is more than 500,000 (half a meg) you need to either trim it down or be creative with how it loads.
If your page takes time too much load, then you may be losing readers. When they were begining, Yahoo set a goal of 10 seconds for their main page to load, and that was back when most people had dial up. That’s still a good measure, because, really, people have poretty short attention spans.
To test how much this is affecting your blog, go to the main page and count off the seconds before you see anything of interest. If it’s more than 10, you need to be concerned. If it’s more than 20 you really need to be concerned.
Another problem excessive bandwidth can cause is slowdown of the reader’s computer. All that data has to go somewhere, and if they are like a lot of blog readers, and multi-task, then they’ll start seeing a serious drain on their resources, which if they discover it’s your page, may make them decide to simply stay away from your blog.
The are three areas to focus on for a solution to this problem: page size, load sequence and exploiting the cache.
I've
been developing web sites for over 12 years. I started with HTML, moved on
to Perl and now do mostly PHP with a lot of MySQL and Javascript as well.
The purpose of this blog is to write about many of the simpler scripting solutions bloggers are either unaware of or unable to implement. Hopefully I'll have something you can use