What Is Website Bandwidth?

What is Website Bandwidth?
Website bandwidth is the amount of data a website can transfer to visitors within a set time. Every website that’s available on the web is accessible because of web hosting. When the web servers that host a website serve up its content to visitors, they require bandwidth. The more visitors come to a website at a time, the more bandwidth the site has to use just to load simple web pages. For websites that have dynamic content and media like video and audio, even more bandwidth is required.

Why Website Bandwidth Matters

Website bandwidth directly affects how well your website performs. If one visitor on a website is watching a video, that requires a small amount of bandwidth. But if 500,000 visitors are all trying to watch a video on that website at the same time—it will require a lot of bandwidth to provide a decent playback quality for all of them. If the site’s web hosting plan doesn’t offer enough bandwidth, those visitors will face slow loading times, buffering, or videos that fail to load entirely. Today’s visitors expect speedy websites that load as expected, right away. To provide that and ensure visitors stick around and are more likely to come back—both important goals for any website—you need to make sure your web hosting plan provides enough bandwidth for your needs.