Diagnosing Bandwidth Problems

Assessing Your Bandwidth Usage

https://university.webflow.com/lesson/bandwidth?topics=hosting-code-export#how-to-view-bandwidth-usage

Identifying "Problem" Assets

Webflow will automatically sort the files by bandwidth utilization, use this to identify your problem assets.

Limitations of the Bandwidth Report

• Assets are identified by name only
• Date is not local, so you cannot test local traffic conveniently

Frequent updates, usually within a few hours

The report frequently updates, usually within a few hours.

Mystery Bandwidth Usage

The lack of visibility into what's happening at the firewall is a real issue, but a few things I've seen cause problems.

First remember Webflow does not track HTML bandwidth, it tracks asset bandwidth, so it's your assets that matter the most.  That makes e.g. GA4 reports of limited value.

These are the things I've seen hit assets hard;

• RSS.  If you're using RSS, some readers will hit your RSS feed hard and frequently, and RSS feeds download uncompressed assets even if you've optimized them, for compatibility with older readers I'm assuming that might not support AVIF.
• SEO tools that scan your site for audits can also do recurring full downloads.
• SEO tools that are designed for editing, like Graphite, can keep re-downloading certain assets while the editor is open.
• AI bots like Claude, will hit juicier sites, ignore the robots.txt and scrape everything including assets
• Monitoring tools ( data dog is a monitoring tool, and probably used as a platform for other monitoring solutions if you're using one )
• Third party monitoring tools, e.g. "watch competitor site for price changes".
• Any scripts which cause assets to unload and reload.  That can include certain interactions, looped background videos, etc.  You can use Chrome's Network tab to learn a lot there, however different browsers can behave differently as well in terms of how they handle and cache assets.

‍

‍

‍

‍