Research shows that web users tend to leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. So how about your site? Is it fast enough to keep your customer? If you haven’t got an answer to this, then it might be the time to run a speed test website.
A speed test not only gives an insight into your website performance but also helps you determine which slow your site down. While there a lot of factors affecting a website’s performance, bandwidth is frequently the limiting factor.
Speed test website: How does Bandwidth Affect Website Performance?
What is Bandwidth?
Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred from your site to users via the Internet. The more bandwidth, the more data you can load at once.
There’s a close relationship between page load time and available bandwidth. If your business doesn’t deliver content that needs high-bandwidth connections such as streaming video, you should design a website that performs quickly on low-bandwidth connections and cuts down on external requests. This ensures a fast page load time on all connection types and bandwidth limits.
Bandwidth and Content Types
A low-bandwidth speed check network connection can load text quickly, but the addition of images and embedded video can slow down the overall page load time of a website for users on slower connections. So, it’s important for websites that load a lot of high-resolution content or deliver large data to have a high bandwidth connection.
Speed test website gives an insight into website performance
External Content
Does your own content contribute to slow page loading time?
Absolutely. Plus, external content such as ad plugins, widgets, or sharing tools that come from different servers can also contribute to slow load time. Though some external content is necessary, you need to cut down how much of it appears on one page to improve overall load time.
Testing a Website
When running a speed test website is important to find which factors slowing you down. There are a lot of tools that enable you to test your website and get recommendations for improving its overall performance. You can also use a tool like MySpeed’s website test, which displays the load time for each element on the page.
Ways to reduce the bandwidth usage of your website.
Optimize images
Large images take up more bandwidth, so take a longer time to load on web pages. You should reduce image file sizes using either a plugin or script, which in turn speeds up the load time of the page.
Compressing images is a commonly used tactic to conserve bandwidth, increase delivery speeds, and reduce the size of your website. This also benefits other aspects of your server such as reduced backup space and disk usage. How to know if this way works? Perform a speed test website before and after optimizing images to see the difference.
Speed test website: Optimize images to reduce bandwidth usage of your website.
Enable browser caching
After getting information from your website, browser caching will store it. If visitors come back to your page, you’ll feel that it loads quickly. The reason is that the browser won’t have to download the static content all over again.
Cache your website
Another way to reduce bandwidth usage of your website is to set an expiry date in the HTTP headers. So, your visitors’ browsers will have no choice but to refresh the content after a specific duration of time. It allows their browser to save a copy of your website, and each time the visitor visits your website, the pages are served from the copy on the browser and not your web server. Give this way a try and run the speed test website regularly to see the improvement in your website performance
Host videos on external sites
The file sizes of videos are big, which can significantly slow down your website and cause lag with your bandwidth. Thus, avoid hosting videos on your website, but upload them to YouTube and embed the link into your web page instead. This contributes much to the faster loading page. Try this way and confirm its effectiveness by running a speed test website.
By hosting files on external sources, you can reduce the burden on your server’s bandwidth. If you can avoid upgrading your bandwidth limit to accommodate large media files, you will save your money and your website should load faster.
Remove non-essential HTML code and tags
Unnecessary code can increase the web page size. So, the most effective way to improve overall website performance is to eliminate them.
Conclusion
How much bandwidth distributed to the website plays an important role in a website’s performance as it determines how fast the server responds to the request. Those ways above will definitely help reduce bandwidth, but before implementing all these things you should also consider your bandwidths requirements and capacity that can be measured by running a speed test website.
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