7 Ways to Reduce Drupal Website BandWidth Use

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Most of Drupal hosting service provider will limit the usage of bandwidth. The more you consume, the more you might be charged. In this tutorial we’ll talk about how to reduce bandwidth consumption.  A few suggestions to reduce consumption would be to compress files when sending from the actual server so that the overall size decreases & don’t send the same file over & over again these are a few starting points for reducing bandwidth consumption.  Below are 7 more ways to reduce bandwidth consumption:

  • If you are using Shared Linux hosting for your Drupal site , you can use the Boost Module https://drupal.org/project/boost.
  • Eliminate EXIF headers from your images. This will save you about 30% on your images.
  • Always use Cache-Control HTTP header, for images that doesn’t change, because we don’t want the user to download them every time when visiting the page.
  • Use CDN for your media files. CDN is content delivery network; you can Google in for details. Put your entire image, video and other large files there.
  • Use image presets to save bandwidth big time. Its like sending 10 mb image 3 times when you can send one that is 1MB.  On the server side In order to accomplish that use gzip compression for sending to all browers execpt IE.  Use mod expires to only ever send an image once.
  • You can save around 50% bandwidth if you can compress your code files HTML, CSS and JS.  For HTML, use HTMLCompressor : https://code.google.com/p/htmlcompressor/.For CSS, use CSS Minifier :https://www.cssminifier.com; For JS, us Minify Javascript Online : https://jscompress.com/
  • Check some of the related modules https://drupal.org/project/advagg – If you want your website to load faster, install this module.  If you like the idea of using Google’s CDN for jquery.js, install this module. It also aggregates JS in the footer. JS minification/CSS compression. Use this module and bring back aggregation for improved performance! Install the bundler submodule and watch how fast your site loads.

https://drupal.org/project/ie_css_optimizer for Drupal 6 solves the IE limitation of loading not more than 31 CSS files per HTML page This problem is fixed in Drupal 7 core.