What is Bandwidth in WordPress
The term “bandwidth” describes the amount of data transferred between users and the server over a certain period. For example, if you have a page that is 2 MB in size, each visit to that page will take up 2 MB of your bandwidth.
So, for 100 visitors per day, you would need 200 MB of daily bandwidth and 6 GB of monthly bandwidth.
Making sure you have enough bandwidth is crucial, especially for high-traffic sites where users constantly exchange large amounts of data with the server.
Your site will go down immediately if you use up all your monthly bandwidth.
Why Is Bandwidth Important?
Your bandwidth is essential to website scalability and defines how much content you can deliver to visitors during high-traffic times.
In addition, a higher bandwidth lets website owners have more dynamic features and content, making their site more appealing to viewers.
How Can I Check My Hosting Bandwidth?
You can quickly check your website’s bandwidth by logging into the control panel of your WordPress hosting account. In the control panel, look for a section that displays your site’s resource activity; this will be in different places for each host.
Many web hosts make this easy to find by displaying an icon or link showing how much bandwidth your site is using.
What Is Unlimited Bandwidth?
“Unlimited bandwidth” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not truly unlimited, as there are still physical limits on the amount of data transferred between users and servers.
However, most hosts offer “unmetered” or “unlimited” bandwidth, which means they won’t charge you extra if you exceed your allotted amount.
While “unlimited” bandwidth is often advertised as a critical feature, it’s not always necessary. This is especially true if you have a low-traffic site.
If you’re unsure whether you need unlimited bandwidth, check with your host to see their policy for overages.
How Much Bandwidth Does My Website Need?
Too much or too little bandwidth can have negative consequences for your website. Therefore, you must find the perfect balance of resources.
The bandwidth you’ll need for your website is based on three factors: the number and size of your pages, how many visitors come to your site, and how many pages each visitor views.
If you’re starting or don’t have much content yet, you won’t need a lot of bandwidth.
If you have a lot of graphics, images, videos, audio files, or downloadable content on your site, or if you receive a high volume of web traffic, you’ll need more bandwidth.
The best way to determine how much additional bandwidth you’ll need for an existing website is to check the traffic reports in your web host account cPanel.
Traffic reports are standard features included with nearly every web hosting service.
If you need help deciding, GreenGeeks is a great managed WordPress hosting provider who will guide you through the process.
Even if you sign up for one of the lower-cost plans with a managed hosting provider, they will not shut down your site if your bandwidth exceeds the limit.
Instead, they’ll contact you to let you know and then take steps to increase your resources so that all of your website visitors have a great experience.
What Happens if I Exceed My Bandwidth?
If you go over the monthly bandwidth limit, typically, one of three things happens:
- Your host could suspend your website.
- They might start charging you for breaching the contract.
- They’ll automatically upgrade your plan.
How Can I Reduce My Bandwidth Usage?
If you’re noticing more web traffic than usual and think you might go over your bandwidth limit, there are a few things you can do.
- The primary focus should be on optimizing the images present on your website through compression. This can be done by yourself or by utilizing plugins such as WP Smush that automatically compress newly uploaded images.
- A content delivery network (CDN) such as Cloudflare can help you by hosting static website files, like images, on a geographically closer server to your visitors. This decreases the load on your primary server and makes your website faster overall.
- In addition to the other methods detailed above, another way to improve your website’s performance is by caching your pages. When you cache a page, your server saves a copy of it, which can then be quickly served to future visitors instead of generating the whole page anew each time someone visits. Caching can be done manually or with plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket.
- Finally, you can enhance the loading speed of your WordPress website. Although this requires basic coding knowledge, plenty of guides and tutorials are available online to assist you.