Bandwidth overview
Use the site usage dashboard to understand bandwidth consumption on your site.
Bandwidth is the total amount of data transferred between your published site and your site visitors.
When a site visitor loads a page on your site, Webflow sends that page and all its assets to the site visitor’s browser. If your site displays a basic page to just one site visitor, the amount of bandwidth used is negligible. However, if your site delivers a complex page with many heavy assets (e.g., images, videos, etc.) to numerous site visitors, the bandwidth consumption increases significantly. Higher bandwidth consumption can slow down site performance, leading to a negative experience for site visitors.
You can use Webflow’s site usage dashboard to view your site’s bandwidth usage and identify high-bandwidth pages and assets.
Note: Bandwidth limits are set per site and vary based on your Site plan.
How to view bandwidth usage
To view your site’s bandwidth usage, go to Site settings > Site usage. There, you can use the date picker to view page and asset bandwidth usage over a preset date range (e.g., this week, last 30 days, this quarter, etc.) or a custom date range.
You can organize the top bandwidth-consuming assets on your site by bandwidth or bandwidth by asset type (e.g., jpeg, svg, etc.). Click See all to view all pages or assets consuming bandwidth on your site. You can also download a CSV file of all pages or assets consuming bandwidth on your site.
How to reduce bandwidth usage and improve site performance
After you’ve identified pages and files consuming bandwidth on your site, you can take the following steps to optimize page and asset performance and reduce bandwidth usage:
- Compress images in the Assets panel
- Compress images in the CMS panel
- Reduce usage of background videos
- Minify your site’s HTML, CSS, and JS
- Clean up unused styles
- Clean up unused interactions
- Optimize your site for different devices and browsers
- Replace background image styles with inline images positioned via object-fit
- Delete unused fonts from your site
- Delete unused assets from the Assets panel
Pro tip: You can use Webflow’s image conversion tool to compress existing image assets on your site by converting them to WebP files. This converts the asset’s file type in the Assets panel and any instances of that asset on the canvas.
Note: Webflow’s built-in responsive images feature automatically resizes inline images based on the device size of your visitor. Responsive images are not automatically generated for background images or images in rich text elements.
FAQ
What factors impact bandwidth usage?
Assets (e.g., images, videos, files, etc.) typically consume the most bandwidth, but there are many other factors that can affect bandwidth usage, including traffic volume (i.e., the number of site visitors and their activity on your site), device and browser differences, etc.
How does Webflow define bandwidth? What types of traffic count toward bandwidth consumption?
Bandwidth includes both asset bandwidth (e.g., images, videos, files, etc.) and hosting bandwidth (e.g., HTML, CSS, and JS files, etc.). Webflow counts traffic from from any type of user agent (i.e., bot or non-bot) and traffic with any status code (e.g., 200, 404s, redirects, etc.).
How far back can I view historical bandwidth data?
The site usage dashboard lets you view bandwidth from April 1, 2024 onward.
Can I identify what percentage of site traffic comes from bots?
The site usage dashboard doesn’t differentiate between bot and non-bot traffic at this time. You can add a robots.txt file to your site to allow or disallow traffic on certain site pages or from bots.
Once I identify high-bandwidth assets, how can I find and compress them on my site?
To find and compress high-bandwidth assets with Webflow’s image conversion tool, open the Assets panel, click the “Expand Assets panel” icon, and search for the asset name. Then, follow the steps to convert existing assets to WebP files.
Do interactions and animations impact bandwidth usage?
Generally, interactions and animations don’t impact bandwidth usage. However, interactions and animations that load additional assets (e.g., an infinite scroll interaction) or trigger server requests (e.g., loading data from the CMS API) can contribute to higher bandwidth usage and poor site performance.
Do third-party integrations impact bandwidth usage?
Scripts and content from third-party services (e.g., analytics tools, embedded content, social media widgets, etc.) generally don’t impact bandwidth usage. However, these can contribute to poor site performance.
What happens if I go over my bandwidth limits?
If your site is on a Basic, CMS, or Business Site plan, it will receive complimentary surge protection. This means you won’t be billed for any overages the first month your site exceeds its bandwidth limit. Sites that exceed their bandwidth limits for a second consecutive month will be automatically upgraded to the plan with the appropriate usage allotment at the end of that second month.
If you’re already on a Business Site plan and you exceed your bandwidth for two consecutive months, you’ll be auto-upgraded with add-ons. If you’re on a Business Site plan, you can also purchase add-ons before you are auto-upgraded. Note that this only applies to Business Site plans that you purchase, upgrade, downgrade, transfer (i.e., transferring your site between Workspaces), or that exceed limits on or after July 15, 2024.
If optimizing assets isn’t enough to bring your usage down and you anticipate needing higher bandwidth limits, please reach out to our Enterprise team to discuss transitioning your site to our Enterprise hosting plan, which offers custom bandwidth and traffic support.