Keeping your website available and fast during times of quarantine
… and how to stay visible when some players eat up all bandwidth!
Within a few days, many aspects of our everyday routines have changed, and a large part of the world’s population is staying 24h in their homes.
Since people started to stay at home, all social interaction, communication, entertainment, working remotely, etc. was moved to the Internet!
For those obvious reasons, overall traffic has significantly increased in the last few weeks.
Last week Netflix announced that it’s lowering video quality to reduce the strain on the internet — and now, according to Reuters, YouTube has followed suit.
The video platform is cutting quality in Europe as thousands of people, social distancing due to the coronavirus pandemic, work — and watch videos — from home.
Bandwith Numbers
OpenVault, which collects cable subscribers’ usage behaviors (in the US) and puts them into data sets, released some COVID-19 related stats. Their data center said that business-hour broadband consumption was up more than 41% one week after the Center for Disease Control declared the coronavirus was a pandemic.
OpenVault’s data found that subscribers’ average usage during the 9 am-to-5 pm workday has risen to 6.3 GB, which is 41.4% higher than the January figure of 4.4 GB.
OpenVault projects that consumption for March will reach nearly 400 GB per subscriber, almost 11% over the previous monthly record of 361 GB in January of this year.
Vodafone, the world’s second-largest mobile operator has almost 120 million customers in a dozen countries in Europe, reports a 50% rise in internet use as more people work from home.
Wurl, a company that delivers video and advertising to connected TVs, estimates the amount of time people spent streaming rose more than 20% globally last weekend.
Yes, everybody is online today!
Get your website ready for big traffic boost
As a website owner/hoster, you might be experiencing challenges with traffic spikes and overall increased load on your hosting infrastructure.
If you are not there yet, rest assured — it’s coming!
There is really one way for fast website speed optimization — IMAGES, VIDEOS, ALL OFF THE MEDIA needs to be fully optimized and on their A-game!
Images and other visual assets represent 60% of your page loading time, it is to expect that most of your traffic is going to depend on how fast they will show to visitors.
Not using a CDN and powerful image compression algorithm to absorb this load, will undeniably result in bad loading times for your users.
With this, your traffic spike will disappear.
We have been working for years to understand and upgrade the media asset optimization in order not to crash under big traffic load.
Here us some of our tips.
Also, make sure to visit us on Filerobot.com and choose one of our best packages for performant and scalable Digital Asset Management.
Our services include Storing, Processing and Accelerating Images, Videos, JS, CSS, and Static Content across the World on any Web application.
So you will get your website ready and steady with lightning rocket speed!
Visual Media Optimization Tips
- Incorporate CDN delivery
- Make sure your images and other digital assets are responsive
- Correctly resize images
- Use the right image format
- Compress images
- Lazy-load non-critical images
- Deploy image spriting
- Start caching image assets
- Preload critical image assets
- JPEG minification
For more tips and how to’s go over to our 20 point checklist for flawless image optimization.
Stay safe and wash your hands!
