My Site Is Using A Lot of Hosting Bandwidth. Suggestions?

[William.Lau]

Hi James,

Your site loading takes quite some time. Although graphics load quickly, there is still something loading in the background.

I suggest checking out which plugins you are using and disable one by one to see what could be conflicting with the load times.

I'm not sure which CMS you are using but I suggest getting a cache plugin to make loading times more quick if its images slowing load times(probably not since graphics loaded quick).

[AdamThompson]

Well, you're probably either getting more traffic and/or maybe you need to optimize your file sizes.

How much bandwidth have you used?

Usually images or videos are what gobbles up bandwidth. Are you hosting any large images, videos, or files?

[AdamThompson]

The site appears to use Drupal. A cache plugin may make the pages load faster, but it won't change the amount of bandwidth used.

[JChronicle]

Nearly 4gb in 4 days... The slider images are rather large.  Are there any good compression tools?  Yahoo smushit didnt make much of a difference.

Any advice on how to make it load faster?  Or is that a server issue?

[JChronicle]

I am using Drupal.

[JChronicle]

Plus the site already caches...

[AdamThompson]

Load time can be a server issue, a software/coding issue, and/or a filesize issue.

4GB of bandwidth in 4 days is a lot - that's how much my site that gets 30K+ uniques per month has used. Based on Alexa rank, it looks like your site doesn't get that much traffic? Have you had an uptick in traffic?

You can check page and file sizes at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ That tool shows your homepage and associated files has a total size of 1MB. To use 4GB of bandwidth at that rate, you'd need ~4,000 pageviews.

You could run your top pages through that tool and see if any of the embedded images or other files are too large.

You could also check your log files to see if someone has embedded an image from your site, you're getting crawled by robots, etc.

Hope that helps!

[William.Lau]

Do you have plugins?

[ThompsonPaul]

Your homepage is a little over 900kb which isn't massive by any means. Your homepage loads in a little over 3.5 seconds from a Virginia location using the equivalent of a slow cable connection so it looks very-well speed optimized to me.

If you've seen that big a jump in bandwidth use with no accompanying jump in traffic, my strong guess is that some other site is leaching your content (otherwise known as hotlinking).

Typically, this means somebody else has embedded images from your site into their own, meaning every time their page displays the image, it loads form your server/bandwidth instead of their own. (Can also happen with other file types)

Some sites do this because they don't know any better, and sometimes it's malicious. I've seen this often happen from forums where a whole page of post images loads every time the thread is viewed. To see if this is happening, you'll need to check in your server logs. Google Analytics won't show it as the images aren't tagged with the tracking code.

If hotlinking is the problem, the only way to stop it is to tell your server to only display images that were requested from your own website pages. You do this through the htaccess file. If your site uses cPanel for it's hosting control panel, there's actually a button on the Panel in the Security section to disable hotlinking. I assume most other control panels have something similar. Be aware that this will disable ALL images from showing on other sites, including any badges etc you may have created for other sites to display intentionally.

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

The reason the site "looks" to tools like it takes a long time to load is because the Google+ API call and the Facebook Connect call are taking an obscenely long time to negotiate their SSL connections - over 11 seconds.

Fortunately the essential user-visible parts of the page (up to document complete) load quickly so the user experience is fine. Might be worth trying to figure out why the SSL negotiation on those 2 files is getting killed so badly though.

Here's a link to the page load Waterfall View that clearly shows the long purple lines indicating SSL delay for those 2 scripts.

[JChronicle]

Is there a way to test the speed of the server also?  I am checking my server logs as you suggested to see if someone is linking to our images...

[JChronicle]

Hmm.. Based on the other responses above my load time was not very long.  Did you try visiting more than once?

[JChronicle]

As of the October 4th these were my statistics for the month of October:

These statistics are based on the October 2012, so far:

• 427K hits
• 3112 unique visits from 12K sources
• 2.65GB data
• 12093 unique visitors

[AdamThompson]

Something doesn't sound right there. You can't have 3112 unique visits from 12093 unique visitors, unless your log file program is using those terms in a different way. If your log file program lets you, you should be able to see which files haven been using the most bandwidth.