However generous the website bandwidth allowance there will always be times where mistakes / increases in traffic or design mistakes cause a website’s traffic to exceed what is normal, in this case its worth investigating as even if you have unlimited bandwidth the user experience could be negatively effected if a browser is having to download data that is not necessary. Here is a sample message that we sent out to a website that was technically designed by another website design company that shows how a website could suddenly begin to ‘consume’ more data that is ‘healthy’.
[Website Designers] Over the last few weeks we have noticed a massive increase in ‘bandwidth’ on your site, this the amount of data that gets transmitted from your ‘server’ to the person looking at your website. You have an ‘allowance’ of bandwidth to ensure each site doesn’t use up the complete allowance but your allowance has been breached multiple times now and is once again approaching the new allowance. To give you some idea of the amount of data your website was using, in the last 90 days your website has used more bandwidth that the next 400 websites put together ! That’s a lot and amounts to nearly 300 GB of data within a 30 day period.
To identify why your bandwidth is being used up we investigated this weekend and found a combination of the causes
1 You are getting more website visitors
2 The ‘admin maintained’ photos have been uploaded at sizes up to 6MB (which is massive and far to big for standard website browsing)
3 The photos website page was created to show the same image as a ‘thumbnail’ and as a full size image (meaning every time someone looks on this page) every full sized image is downloaded .
4 You have increased the amount of photos on that page by 100%
To remedy this we have downloaded all the photos and re-sized them to a size of between 100kb-150kb at a resolution of 800px*600px which is perfect for website images and you probably will not see or notice any difference to the massive 6MB images that were uploaded to your website page previously. The actions taken to remedy your website ‘health’ have ensured it remains ‘live’ and has avoided it being taken down and are ‘extra-ordinary and I hope you appreciate these needed to be done immediately and without your authorisation and will be adding a period of website support to the next invoice.
Short / Medium term Recommendations
You should ensure all uploaded images are no bigger than 800*600px and no larger than 150kb
Long Term
Its possible to re-design your system so that each image has an individual thumbnail and a larger image to ensure all large images are not downloaded when the page is viewed.
[Website Client Response] Thanks for spotting this problem and fixing this before clients were adversely affected, the reason why the larger images were uploaded is because we have new manager who has been uploading the photos and I didn’t realise she didnt know how to re size and optimise the images prior to upload to the website.
