cPanel Monthly Bandwidth Traffic - HTTP Traffic Extremely High

Question

So I have a website/blog which I have hosted with a service which is offering me 2000mb of monthly bandwidth traffic.

I recently have started getting a lot of traffic, or I suppose, enough to push me quite close to the cap. I am already at 79% for August and it is practically all due to the HTTP traffic component!

I noticed that the bandwidth traffic really spikes during the days of a new post. Also, I do have videos from Vimeo embedded in my posts, so I am not sure if loading those on my page counts towards the bandwidth.

So what can I possibly do? And is this high usage actually just from people visiting and loading my blog post in their browser? Do you have any suggestions which would significantly reduce the bandwidth usage?

I can't afford to raise the bandwidth cap either. For reference, I have an installation of Wordpress running on my website.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Have you checked your access log / webstats? Is this reporting a higher number of visitors to match the bandwidth usage? Are you getting an increased amount of bot traffic? Rogue bots can perhaps be blocked in .htaccess if this is an issue.

Are your images optimised?

Have you enabled gzip compression for your pages? This can drastically cut the size (and speed) of your HTML pages, CSS and JavaScript.

Are you making the most of browser caching? Setting expiration date headers in the future for static content/resources.

I do have videos from Vimeo embedded in my posts, so I am not sure if loading those on my page counts towards the bandwidth.

This itself should not count directly against your bandwidth.