What Is Bandwidth? What Is Traffic (Data Transfer)?
In this article we explain what the term bandwidth (traffic / data transfer) means in e-commerce and how it is usually calculated.
The amount of data a site has transferred is often called bandwidth usage or traffic. Bandwidth is frequently described as only the data visitors use when browsing your site—but that is incomplete. When you calculate bandwidth you should include both the total data used by visitors and the data your site consumes for integrations and other background operations.
How Is Bandwidth Calculated on E-Commerce Sites?
When someone visits your store they typically start on the homepage. If they like your products they will browse further. Each new page they open consumes part of your bandwidth allowance. On a typical e-commerce homepage you often have several sliders (large hero images), six or seven banners, and many product images for bestsellers, new arrivals, campaigns, and so on. A visitor might load roughly three sliders at about 400 KB each, six banners at about 250 KB each, and around forty product images at about 150 KB each—these are reasonable “optimal” sizes. If images are heavier than that, bandwidth usage rises and load times can drop sharply.
If the homepage is built with those sizes, traffic for a single homepage view breaks down roughly as follows:
3 sliders → about 1,200 KB
6 banners → about 1,500 KB
40 products → 40 × 150 KB = 6,000 KB
Homepage total ≈ 8,700 KB
Other assets (scripts, styles, small resources) often add roughly another 1,000 KB. So one visitor loading only the homepage might use on the order of 9,700 KB (~9.5 MB). If that visitor continues shopping and opens about ten pages—say product pages with around 25 product photos each—each product page might use about 25 × 150 KB = 3,750 KB (~3.5 MB). Together with the homepage, a fairly engaged visit can reach on the order of 14 MB of data transfer. There is no single fixed rule, but a visitor who views about ten pages often has a relatively high chance of converting.
In our e-commerce packages, 6,000 GB per year of traffic equals about 6,144,000 MB. Dividing by ~14 MB per “rich” visit suggests on the order of 440,000 such visits per year, or roughly 1,200 visitors per day.
These rough figures show how large the traffic allowance in