Bandwidth

[frankb]

I will start by apologising-dont know which is the best section for a question about bandwidth- so I put it here. I dont know if there is a way to judge bandwidth usage-my site used up 350mb in 4 days with 43 visits, it does have alot of images but this seems a huge chuck of my 1000mb limit per month. Does it indicate that I've built site wrong or is it to be expected and I either need a bigger hosting package or jut pay for the extra, dont know what (if anything) is normal.
Thanks
frank

www.past-reflections.co.uk

[Duncan Rounding]

On a quick look I see that your homepage is over 1mb alone. This page: http://www.past-reflections.co.uk/ac...__part_2_.html is about 1.7mb.

You certainly need to optimise your images and try and get the page sizes down to around 200-300k max if you can.

[NormanRouxel]

Following on from Duncan:

The first product image on http://www.past-reflections.co.uk/ac...__part_2_.html is about 120Kb and the rest are similar sizes.

Applying a modest amount of JPEG compression and it becomes 21Kb - less than one fifth the size!

Likewise on your home page where the 4 images in total are about 1Mb when they would total to only around 100Kb if saved with reasonable compression.

Do this to all such images and your bandwidth usage will be much less.

[frankb]

Thanks very much- it makes sense, just hadnt realised the implications.

[malbro]

Does it indicate that I've built site wrong or is it to be expected and I either need a bigger hosting package or jut pay for the extra, dont know what (if anything) is normal.
Thanks
frankwww.past-reflections.co.uk

I take it you are just starting off with this site, if so my experience with one site was that during the first six months the site climbed up from nothing up to 1Gb per month progressing to about 2Gb by the end of the first year, after three years the site is now around 6 to 7Gb per month. Sites will vary but this one uses lots of graphics and we use compression on jpegs to keep page sizes around 120Kb.

[Duncan Rounding]

After you've squeezed out what you can with the images you can try Smush It to remove the last drops (or bytes as it where): http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/

[frankb]

Thanks for tips so far,as you gather I'm new to this and this is probably a stupid question --how do I determine the size of a particular web page - if I could do that I can keep tracks on what im doing.
thanks
frank

[leehack]

At this stage in your ability, image size is all you can really do, just maximise that as much as poss and look to get a pro involved when you have funds available. You can right click on a page and select properties to get an idea on page size, firebug will also show you, best way I find is to load up page on blackberry, gives you full size as it loads.

[chickenhouseman]

Google webmaster tools show page speeds and highlights examples of the items that make the pages slow.

Pingdom.com has a page speed tool that checks a page and give a time for each element.

Or you could just look at you image folder and resize anything bigger than 30k

[Duncan Rounding]

Get the Developer Toolbar add-in for Firefox, that will give lots of information.