{"id":899,"date":"2007-09-13T20:34:36","date_gmt":"2007-09-13T19:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/09\/attempting-to-reduce-my-websites-bandwidth-usage.htm"},"modified":"2007-10-14T00:22:10","modified_gmt":"2007-10-13T23:22:10","slug":"attempting-to-reduce-my-websites-bandwidth-usage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/09\/attempting-to-reduce-my-websites-bandwidth-usage.htm","title":{"rendered":"Attempting to reduce my website’s bandwidth usage"},"content":{"rendered":"

This website is in a spot of trouble. Over the last few months, I’ve seen the bandwidth usage grow dramatically although it seems to have grown faster than the number of subscribers\/readers. We’re not talking vast volumes here and my hosting provider<\/a> has been very understanding, but even so it’s time to do something about it.<\/p>\n

So I had a think, and came up with three options:<\/p>\n

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  1. Don’t write anything. Tried that for half of June (when I was on holiday). No noticeable change in the webstats!<\/li>\n
  2. Write rubbish. It’s debatable as to whether that’s a continuation of the status quo.<\/li>\n
  3. Drp ll th vwls s f wrtng txt mssgs.<\/a>\n
  4. Optimise the site to reduce bandwidth usage, without a major rewrite. Yeah! That sounds like a challenge.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So, option four sounded like the best course of action. There are two main elements to consider in this:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Site performance (i.e. how fast pages load).<\/li>\n
    2. Bandwidth usage.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      As far as I can tell, my site performance is not blindingly fast but it’s OK. I could use something like the WP-Cache<\/a> plugin to cache content but, although that should reduce the load on the server, it won’t actually decrease my bandwidth usage. In fact it might increase it as I’d need to turn off HTTP compression.<\/p>\n

      That led me to concentrate on the bandwidth issues. This is what I tried (based mostly on Jeff Atwood’s experience of reducing his site’s bandwidth usage<\/a>):<\/p>\n