When your website grows, it also makes us happy, and you don’t have to constantly change packages because your data traffic increases. Monthly traffic, also called “bandwidth” is something that is on everyone’s lips since Internet providers, mainly mobile Internet providers, offer packs according to the transfer of information measured in GB (gigabytes). Just as your mobile browsing data plan has some capacity to send and receive information, the same is true for your web hosting plan.
In many cases, the excessive consumption of this resource on web pages is due to a poorly optimized site, or small details that the website owners or their developers miss, and that after going out into the field games can play tricks on us by exhausting this resource sooner rather than later.
It doesn’t matter how much traffic you have included in your hosting plan: it is always more optimal to consume less than more. Your website will run faster, search engines will love it, and you’ll never get a wake-up call from your hosting provider.
What is monthly transfer or monthly traffic in hosting plans
Monthly transfer or monthly traffic is consumed when data leaves the server and is delivered to the end user (outbound traffic), as well as when you upload data to the server (inbound traffic), or when you are uploading or creating your website.
All data sent from the website to the customer and vice versa is counted as transfer usage, traffic or also “broadband” or “bandwidth”.
How to save monthly transfer in GB on your hosting plan
Since we love to help you, we prepared these super simple tips to implement to reduce your hosting traffic, without affecting its functionality or modifying its aesthetics. By applying these changes, you will consume less monthly transfer; and your website and your wallet: happy.
So, how to save monthly transfer on your hosting plan? Let’s see what small changes we can make. We are also going to show you some tools external to your hosting to boost your site incredibly.
Install Cloudflare
Cloudflare takes several awards for website plugins in recent years. Not only does it protect your website from threats and improve the browsing experience regardless of where you are browsing from, but it also acts as a cache for static files such as images and CSS, which abruptly reduces the transfer consumption of your plan.
Almost immediately you install it on your website, you will begin to perceive its benefits, and save bandwidth in abundance. At WNPower we are fans of Cloudflare and very easy. In this other note we tell you how to install and configure Cloudflare on your site.
Additionally, Cloudflare has a mode called Cache Everything (a fairly aggressive type of cache) that is very useful for blogs and non-transactional sites. If your website is about this, we recommend implementing it. You could be in for a surprise, where you may even be able to reduce your hosting plan to a smaller one and save money.
Optimize the images on your website
Another common factor of monthly traffic consumption of hosting is images. What often happens is that during the development of the site, photos, graphic material or images of all kinds are uploaded that are not optimized, and are linked to a very high resolution file. We have seen cases where just one image weighed 10 MB. All crazy and a waste of traffic! The reality is that the resolution needed for a photo or image to look good on a website should not weigh more than a couple of hundred KB (kilobytes).
If you are working with WordPress, fortunately there are plugins that are responsible for compressing and optimizing your images in just a few clicks. There are 4 plugins that fulfill this function very well: Imagify, WP Smush, ShortPixel and Optimole.
If you do not have experience managing WordPress sites, it is best to consult with your website developer before implementing a plugin to compress your images, since its installation could conflict with other installed plugins or your theme. And if you are not working with WordPress and your website was custom programmed, and you have doubts about this, it is better that you talk to its creator so that he can take a look at the size of the images if you wish.
In any case, we always recommend generating and downloading a backup of your site or creating a staging copy to work there before making any live modifications.
Do not host videos on your hosting
One of the biggest consumers of website traffic is videos. You are most likely using videos embedded in your website, especially if it is a product catalog, a blog, or a news site. Bad practice!
You will be consuming traffic from your plan, something that you can severely save if you move that material to tools like YouTube. YouTube, in addition to hosting your videos, will allow you to insert them into any type of website thanks to the flexibility and compatibility of its player. Everyone will be able to see your videos, without consuming the traffic and storage space of your web hosting package.
In addition, users who search for videos on YouTube are billions. By simply tagging your videos with the right tags, you can use it to drive traffic to your website and convert.
Move your audio files
If you have audio files embedded on your website, use an external tool like Soundcloud to upload and share your pieces. Like YouTube, you can insert your audio files with a player provided by them.
This practice applies perfectly if your website is about a podcast or your own garage band.
Do not host direct downloads on your website
Just as we do not recommend hosting large videos and images on your hosting, we also do the same with downloadable files. We understand that you may need to share something with your clients or your surfers, which can vary from a file in PDF format, or a compressed file with various contents, but your hosting is not the best place of all to do it.
Not only will you consume space on your plan, but you will also increase traffic unnecessarily. That is why we recommend using solutions like Google Drive to upload and share your files. Google Drive has a way where you can get a public link to link your downloads from your site. Isn’t it great?
Do not use your hosting to store large files, backups or make backup copies
The same as in the previous title. Your hosting is carefully designed to serve your website at full speed, and not to use as file storage.
In addition to the fact that you could run into some limitations from your provider to take care of the health of the platform that hosts your site, your hosting is not the best place to use to store your files and backups.
Use an email service like Zoho Mail or Google
Email also consumes traffic on your hosting plan. Both when you receive an email and when you send it. If you delegate this to another email provider then this won’t be a problem for you.
Email providers like Zoho Mail or Google Workspace solve this problem, and offer you a complete and optimal email service for your business. In this other note, we tell you more about this and how to get up to 5 premium Zoho Mail email accounts, for free. Additionally, you can integrate Zoho and Google Workspace with your WNPower hosting in 1 click with our exclusive tools.
Remove junk code from your site
If you’re a website programmer, it’s good practice to review your codes, files, and stylesheets before handing over a project. Code that is not used and takes up space within a website file is traffic that will consume the hosting plan in the future.
It is better that if you have draft or commented codes, you delete them when you decide to upload the site to hosting. If you need to have these codes on hand, we recommend having a trial or staging version on your local computer or on a hidden instance on the hosting to avoid moving them to the production version.
