How to Optimize the Bandwidth Usage of a Site
High bandwidth usage can impact a website's performance and potentially lead to additional costs. Fortunately, there are several effective strategies can be implemented to minimize bandwidth consumption and optimize website efficiency.
Viewing a Site's Bandwidth Usage
There are a few different ways to view the bandwidth usage of a site which provide different levels of detail.
Admin Area
The Admin Dashboard has a section called "My Website Resources" which gives a high-level overview of the resource usage of the site for the current calendar month. The bandwidth used so far this month can be seen here:
The limit shown here will take into account the bandwidth that comes with the license as well as any additional bandwidth that has been purchased for the site via the VIP Add-Ons Club and individual Bandwidth Boost Add-Ons.
This same information can also be found by navigating to Settings > Domain Manager > Website Resources in the Admin area:
cPanel
While the Admin area will only show the current month's bandwidth usage, cPanel offers some additional historical data for previous months as well. This data can be viewed by navigating to Developer Hub > cPanel Dashboard from the Admin area.
Once in cPanel, click on "Bandwidth in the "Metrics" section:
The top section of this page will show graphs with the average bandwidth usage per minute over the past 24 hours, past week, and past year.
The section below this shows the account's bandwidth usage over the previous months. This is useful to see the general trend of historic bandwidth usage of the account. This shows both the total bandwidth usage in each month and the bandwidth consumed by each protocol used by the account:
- HTTP: Humans and bots loading pages on the website
- FTP: Transferring files to and from the website
- IMAP, POP3, and SMTP: Emails being sent to and from email accounts hosted in the cPanel account
These are interesting statistics to have, but typically the vast majority of the bandwidth usage will be from HTTP - the use of the website itself.
AWStats
cPanel also provides a tool called AWStats which offers a more in-depth look into the specific sources of traffic to the website, and the bandwidth they each consumed. This is a great tool for identifying the traffic sources that are using bandwidth and where the optimization opportunities can be found.
Please see this article for more information about identifying sources of bandwidth consumption using AWStats.
General Strategies to Reduce Bandwidth Usage
These steps apply to all websites and are beneficial regardless of the specific sources of traffic that use the bandwidth of the site.
Set Up Cloudflare
Cloudflare acts as a protective shield and performance booster for websites. It caches static content (like images, CSS, and JavaScript files) on its global network of servers, reducing the load on the origin server and minimizing bandwidth usage. Additionally, Cloudflare's robust security features filter out malicious traffic and bot attacks, further saving bandwidth.
See our step-by-step guide on connecting a site to Cloudflare.
Optimize Images with Imagekit.io
Images are often the largest contributors to bandwidth usage. Imagekit.io automatically optimizes and resizes images, delivering the right image format and size to each user's device.
This intelligent image optimization significantly reduces the amount of data transferred, leading to faster page loads and lower bandwidth consumption.
See our guide on setting up Imagekit.io for a website.
Addressing Specific Sources of Bandwidth Usage
Beyond the general steps to optimize bandwidth usage listed above, there are specific steps that can be taken that are unique to each individual website.
The first step to find undesirable sources of traffic that can be address. See our article on Identifying Sources of Bandwidth Usage with AWStats.
Once the sources of traffic that need to be addressed are identified, follow the steps below to block them.
Block Human Sources of Traffic From Outside the Target Market
If the target audience is concentrated in specific regions, blocking traffic from other countries can significantly reduce bandwidth usage. There are 2 primary ways to do this:
- For sites using Cloudflare - use Cloudflare's WAF tool to block or allow traffic from a specific list of countries.
- For sites not using Cloudflare - use the built-in Block Traffic by Country tool in the Admin area of the website.
Block Traffic from Undesirable Bots
While some bots (like search engine crawlers) are essential for a website's visibility, others can consume significant bandwidth without providing any value to the website.
The default robots.txt file provided with the website blocks all bots except for major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) and Twitter/X.
In most cases, using the default robots.txt rules is sufficient to prevent the vast majority of unwanted bot traffic. Please see this article on managing the robots.txt file in order to restore the default rules or add custom ones.
