How can you design a low-bandwidth optimized website?

Whenever you work with websites, there are so many things happening behind the scenes, sessions, network calls, cookies, authentication, authorization, security etc. Hence many data is transmitted to and fro, in order for our website to be fast without any interruption. You need to optimize whatever resources you use. It can be images, videos, libraries or implementing good design principles.

Remember one thing when you minify your code, don't do it to a file which you will need to modify later as after minifying it's really hard to modify the code. In case of bundling you can do that to all the files which are available. This is an effective way of optimizing the website.

An interesting fact in the world of web development is the concept of "2G Tuesdays" introduced by Facebook. To better understand the experiences of millions of users accessing their platform on slow internet connections, particularly in developing countries, Facebook implemented "2G Tuesdays" for its employees. On these days, employees would have their internet speed throttled to 2G levels for an hour. This initiative, started 2015, was aimed at fostering empathy and a deeper understanding among Facebook developers and designers about how a significant portion of their user base interacts with their services. It highlighted the importance of optimizing for low-bandwidth conditions to ensure a smooth and accessible experience for all users.

You can inject the CSS to the page via the style tag. That way, the browser doesn't have to fetch an extra file. It's also useful to use "coverage" tools to remove unused CSS and JS code. That way you can reduce the size of your code.

Caching and Lazy loading are key optimizations to make user experience better. Taking an example will be better. Caching: Let's say you are scrolling through the posts in any social platform, the images/videos in posts will be cached into a local memory such that if you close and reopen the website/app you'll not have to reload them. Thus it optimizes your network usage and time. Lazy loading: Let's say you are scrolling through the posts in any social media platform, the post that you see for the first time will be loaded only when you scroll into that view. Another example is if you want to see all comments of a post you can load them only when required. Hope it helps ;)

Hey web designers! ?? Save bandwidth, speed up your site—let's talk low-bandwidth optimization with caching and lazy loading. 1. Caching Magic: Your website has a memory. Store content on the user's browser or server to skip unnecessary downloads. Use tricks like Cache-Control or ETag headers for control. 2. Lazy Loading Wisdom: Grab only what you need. Load content when it's needed. Use attributes like loading="lazy" or libraries like LazyLoad to save bandwidth until it's necessary. Why does it matter? Bandwidth is precious. By caching and lazy loading, you're not just speeding up your site; you're making it user-friendly in the world of slow connections. Save bandwidth, boost speed—the web design game! ????

Honestly if your bandwidth is low and a million users suddenly visit your website, even if your site is perfectly optimized it will STILL CRASH! Thats exactly what happened to an American startup company who achieved some success story. So the CNN wrote a blog about it and mentioned their website link in the blog. And their Website crashed due to the huge traffic! ( i dont remember the company's name but its a true story i watched on YouTube )

It's obvious, and yet a common oversight, but refraining from the use of autoplay videos is pivotal when aiming for a well-optimized, low-bandwidth website. Autoplay features tend to substantially spike bandwidth consumption, leading to prolonged loading times and potential user frustration.

Prioritize critical content to load first, enhancing the perceived speed of your website. Implement responsive design to ensure compatibility with various devices and screen sizes. Consider implementing a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute content across multiple servers, improving loading times globally. Regularly update and optimize your website to align with evolving best practices in low-bandwidth design.

Optimising the website starts with the optimised and well curated content and its distribution. The most of the time for website creation time must be spent in designing and planning the user experience and ease of finding the requisite content in the fastest manner. This reduces the unwanted clicks and provides great user experience leaving room for use of bandwidth to load graphics and appealing fonts and colours.