Less than 5% of all WebCom customers use more than traffic quotas every month. If you find, however, that the net volume of traffic to and from your site exceeds your monthly allowance, it can be cost effective to reduce the raw volume of transferred data in ways which do not impair your site's message. This page provides ideas on how to accomplish this.

• Site Structure
• Modification of Graphic Files
• Password Protection

The way your site is organized can have a significant impact on the amount of traffic it generates, and the value of the generated traffic. Questions to think about:

• Which portions of my site are the most popular?
• Which elements within these areas consume the greatest amount of bandwidth? (is there one graphic in particular that can be eliminated or redesigned to consume less bandwidth?)
• What is the path visitors take through my site? Is there a point at which I can tell a person is really interested in what I have to sell or say? Can I change the structure and organization of my site to reduce the amount of traffic generated before that point?

The largest traffic generator on most sites will be the graphics embedded within a page. The amount of bandwidth can be reduced by:

1. Use of JPEG format graphics, in place of GIF format graphics
2. Reducing the size of images, by

• Using lower resolution images
• Reducing the size of the image by manipulating the number of colors (biplanes) within the image
• Using a higher compression ratio on your JPEG images

Users with high traffic sites may wish to password protect their sites, and give out passwords to people who request them. This will prevent the consumption of large amounts of bandwidth by casual visitors without a strong interest in your site. Password protecting Web pages is easy at WebCom. Full documentation is available at: http://webcom.com/~webcom/help/acc_auth/.