How Much Hosting Bandwidth Do I Need For My Website

Importance of Bandwidth in Determining the Page Load Speed

Bandwidth and Page Load Speed

Thinking like a user, what we all love when we open any website or webpage is its loading time.

We want that site to get a load at an instance without taking our time. The user enjoys surfing site with high page loading speed.

Not only the user but even according to Google’s algorithm the Page Load Speed time matters a lot.

Page Speed optimization is one of the most important factors that help our sites to get ranked on search engines. And Bandwidth plays an important role in deciding the page speed load.

What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be sent over a connection in a specific period of time.

Bandwidth is a very important factor in increasing or decreasing page load speed.

Low Bandwidth can decrease the page load speed even over a high internet connection. However, one doesn’t need high bandwidth to load a bunch of text, it can be done on low bandwidth too but when it comes to loading high-quality images and videos or streaming videos or those that deliver large data downloads requires high bandwidth or their page load speed will excessively fall and so does their ranking.

How to determine, bandwidth a hosting needs for a website?

There are few factors which we must look into before deciding the bandwidth a hosting needs

  • Traffic
  • Layout
  • Future plans

How Much Hosting Bandwidth Do I Need For My Website

Traffic: We must understand how much traffic we are expecting on our sites. This will help us to determine the bandwidth we are supposed to buy with hosting.

The amount of bandwidth we need is directly proportional to the amount of traffic flowing to our site.

To be precise, suppose if we are having a lot of traffic on our site then it is obvious that we need a high bandwidth to transfer or display data with high speed to all the users at the same time and if the traffic flows is less then even with less bandwidth we can display contents to the users with high speed. 

Layout: Layout of our site also determines what amount of bandwidth we need for our site. It is also directly proportional to the amount of bandwidth.

If the layout of our site is quite simple and doesn’t have any high-resolution media or heavy CSS behind it then we don’t need high bandwidth.

And if we are using heavy CSS for our site layout and steaming high-resolution media then we will have to go for a higher amount of bandwidth to load all the data at the same time.

Future Plans: Well, everyone already knows that how long they want their site to run. And it will also help to decide the amount of bandwidth they will need.

If one is planning for a long term site, then it is obvious that later their data on the site will increase and so will the traffic so it will be better to take high amount of bandwidth for long term sites and if one wants their site for a very limited time then they can go for a lower amount of bandwidth.

Now, these three are the main factors which we must have to keep in our minds for determining the amount of bandwidth we need for our site.

We can’t determine the bandwidth amount by excluding any of the factors. All three are equally important and must.

What is Page Load Speed?

Page Load Speed can be understood as the time taken by a site to load all the contents including media files(images and videos) after a click on the site link. Generally, users expect the site to be loaded in 3 seconds or less and if it takes more than that then most of them leave the page or site. 

According to a few studies on page load time,

Google: Half second increase in page load time decreases 20% traffic and revenue.

Financial Times: 1-second increase in page load time decreases 4.9% article readers and 7.2% decreases while the loading speed increased by 3 seconds.

GQ Magazine: Decrease in page load time from 7 seconds to 1.5 seconds increases the number of visitors to 11 million from 6 million. And the average time spent on the page also increases by 5.9 minutes to 7.8.

From these surveys, we can clearly see what impact page load speed does on the users.

Bandwidth and Page Load Speed are complexly related to each other.

The Page Load Speed is very important for any site as per Google’s algorithm.

The site with high Page Load Speed gets a better edge over the Page with lower Page Load Speed.

And to increase the Page Load Speed, bandwidth comes into action. Higher the amount of Bandwidth, the higher the Page Load Speed.