Your website is made up of text, images, and many lines of code. All that is what’s called your website’s data, and when someone visits your site, you have to send all that data to their computer or mobile device.
Why You Need a Lot of Bandwidth
We’ve discussed what bandwidth is, so you know it’s absolutely necessary if people are going to be able to access your site. But, why is it important to have a lot of it?
Here are three important reasons why you should have plenty of bandwidth in your hosting plan:
- Your website can have more media elements: If you have limited bandwidth, you won’t be able to send your website to many people, especially if your website has a lot of pictures, videos, and animations. But, if you have a high level of bandwidth, you’ll be able to add as much content to your website as you want without having to worry about reaching your bandwidth limit.
- Your website will have less chance of crashing: Suppose your plan provides bandwidth to support a thousand visitors, but one month, you get five thousand. Due to the lack of bandwidth, most of the five thousand visitors wouldn’t be able to access your website. That’s a good reason to have more bandwidth—if your site gets a spike in traffic, everyone will be able to access it.
- Your visitors can view more pages of your website:
If you’re building a website that’s frequently going to have new web pages, like blog posts and product pages, it’s a good idea to get a hosting package with a large amount of bandwidth.
If you do, your visitors will be able to access all those new pages.
So, in short, the more bandwidth you have, the more rich content and traffic your site can support.
How To Calculate Your Bandwidth Needs
Step 1 – Check how many monthly visitors your website gets.
The information is easy to find in your WordPress or Google Analytics dashboard.
Step 2 – Check the average number of pageviews per visitor.
Again, in your Google Analytics or WordPress dashboard, you can look up how many pages the average person opens when they visit your website.
Step 3 – Calculate the average webpage size on your site.
You can use a tool like Pingdom to find out the size of your site’s web pages. Check as many pages as you can so the average will be more accurate.
When you have all three numbers, simply multiply them, like this:
Monthly website visitors x average pageviews x average web page size
For example, if you get 5,000 visitors a month, with the average visitor opening roughly 2 web pages, and each web page is approximately 2 MB in size, this means your bandwidth usage is:
5,000 x 2 x 2 = 20,000 MB, or 20 GB per month.
By estimating your bandwidth usage in this way, you can predict your future bandwidth requirements.
You should purchase a hosting plan that offers at least 50% more bandwidth than you currently need. This will give you room to add more content to your website and handle more traffic spikes when your site suddenly gets popular.
