How to reduce your site's bandwidth usage

If you're like most webmasters, you're concerned with controlling your site's bandwidth usage. Most web hosting plans being offered today come with a very generous bandwidth allotment, but exceeding that amount can cost you plenty.

Here are a few tips for minimizing your website's bandwidth usage:

Keep the use of graphics to a minimum. While several pretty pictures on each page makes your site interesting, they won't do you any good if your visitors click away before your 150k home page loads. Use images sparingly (only when they add real value to the content on the page).
Crop your images and remove all of the non-essential parts. Why put up a 100k jpeg file when you can remove a couple of inches of clutter and serve up a 35k file?
Use a GIF or JPEG optimizer to reduce the file sizes of your images. Just do a web search for "image optimizer" and you'll find loads of free utilities to choose from.
Use external Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files to reduce your pages' file sizes by a huge margin. The size of a typical web page can easily be cut in half by simply replacing dozens of HTML <Font> codes with a tiny external CSS file.
Move your long javascripts to an external javascript file.
Use a robots.txt file to exclude all but the most essential robots from crawling your site.
Prevent other websites from hotlinking your images. Most hosting providers offer an easy way to do this from within the control panel.
Remove as much white space from your HTML code as possible.

Optimizing your website for leaner, faster loading pages will help you stay within your monthly bandwidth allotment while providing your site's users with a more pleasant visit!