How to Efficiently Upload Media to Save Bandwidth and Improve Performance

Today we are going to see how to save bandwidth and improve performance by efficiently uploading media on a website. So, you will be able to keep your hosting plan within the bandwidth limit and speed up the website by serving optimized content to the users.

1. Resize Media Files based on your Requirements

Before uploading the media files to the website, make sure that they are resized to fit the content area. For example, if your website content area is just 700px in width, you do not need an image with 1920px width. It not only cause unnecessary file size but also make the image look blurry or with less quality as it doesn’t fit the placeholder. So, make sure that all your media files are correctly resized before uploading it to the website. In simple words, provide what really necessary.

2. Compress Media Files Before Uploading

You can reduce the size of your media files even by 90% by compressing it. There are several software’s such as Ceasium, that lets you crop and compress images without losing the quality of the files. There are also websites such as CompressPNG, CompressJPG, TinyJPG, etc. for compressing them online. If you are going to upload any video files, you can go with a video compression utility like Handbrake. Compressing media files before uploading can save a ton of your disk space as well as it will considerably reduce the bandwidth usage. If you can reduce a 100KB image to just 10KB, you can load 10 images with the same bandwidth of loading 1 uncompressed image.

3. Reduce the Number of Media Files

Images, Videos, Audios, or any other media files sure does engage the users and improve the overall user experience. However, only use them in fewer numbers. Of course you shouldn’t be very strict about the numbers, however, you should always try to reduce the media file usage to the minimum. In other words, keep a balance based on your available bandwidth and server power.

4. Automate File Upload

If you are a web developer or have access to one, you can automate the file upload process and make sure images are optimized while your users are uploading them. For example, you can automatically resize, compress or convert the images to a different image format. Cloudinary is a free solution that can help automate image uploads in PHP, Angular, and other web programming languages.

5. Host the Media Files on a CDN

CDN or Content Delivery Network stores your images and distribute them from their servers placed all over the globe. So, instead of serving the images from a single web server, your media will get served from a server nearest to the visitor, resulting in a better performance. This also reduces the bandwidth usage of your hosting account. However, it will consume the bandwidth from your CDN and you may need to pay for that. If you are running a website with a lot of visitors and a lot of media content, you should consider using a CDN such as MaxCDN. WordPress also provides a free CDN in their Jetpack plugin.

6. Embed Images from other Websites

This is not recommended in most of the cases. But, if you have an extremely huge website and it is very difficult to download and upload all the media files to your own server, you could consider loading the resources directly from other websites using their source URL. But the problem is that, if they remove/change the location of the media file, that will result in a missing image on your website. So, if you are OK with that and if you can always keep an eye on the content, you may proceed with embedding media files from other websites.

So, these are the most useful methods that you could follow to save some bandwidth as well as improving the website performance. As media files consume a major portion of the overall size of your web page, it is really important to optimize them. We cannot avoid media files in this era. So, optimizing them is the best solution.