: How do I determine how much bandwidth a user need to use my website? I am being asked to determine the bandwidth requirements for users accessing my site, but I do not even know where to

@Berryessa370

From the question it looks to me that what you're really looking for is the "page weight" for your site. You need to know how much time your users will have to wait for the pages on your site to load. Especially with all the backend processing and other technologies involved. "Page weight" used to refer to how much data was sent, the combined file sizes of the HTML, JS, CSS, and images. Now that so much has become dynamic, on both ends of the wire, it often refers to the time to load for a page. Most of that time is usually spent sending data, but a slow server doing heavy processing can make things slower than normal, and heavy DOM work on the client side can make it take longer to render the page for the user, even after all the data has arrived. Of course the faster the clients connection, the bigger the difference is for all the processing, relative to actual data transfer.

WebPagetest is an open source project backed by Google that focuses on more on network aspects such as time to first byte and keep-alive rather than the constituent elements of a page. It is an excellent tool with installations in many countries and allows users to chose different (real) browsers to run the test on. WebPagetest also retains linkable reports and generates HAR files and screenshots. WebPagetest has a fully documented API making it a very useful tool for bulk analysis. One particularly nice feature of WebPagetest is how it measures both the first view page and repeat view page weights, an important aspect of performance.

ready.mobi is a tool from mobiforge and, as such, represents their own stance on the problem. Ready focuses on page weight and complexity, and usefully lets you know how you fare in relation to the Alexa 1000 sites. Ready can generate boss-friendly PDF reports and lets you create an account to track your site’s progress over time, though I've never done that. Ready has a documented API for bulk testing. Much like WebPagetest, mobiReady also generates linkable reports.

I find both usefull for their unique aspects. ready.mobile gives a breakdown for several tests that are applied to the page load process, along with hints about how to adjust/fix problem areas. Of course, their "problems" might be design choices you've made intentionally, so you may ignore some of their results if you choose. WebPagetest gives a nice waterfall diagram showing the completion of your page load as it all adds up. It also gives a very in depth collection of metrics from the test that can take you quite a while to look through. In either case, you'll be able to get an idea of what it will cost your users to access the pages.

As an example, using my profile page for this site, I tested it on ready.mobi and got these results.

ready.mobi results click to review

Then I ran the test through WebPageTest, taking advantage of their advanced options to select three different locations gloablly, at three different speeds. I used Chrome as the browser for all three locations. The settings were for Dulles, VA, USA using a FIOS connection (20/5 Mbps 4ms RTT), Ireland using a DSL connection (1.5 Mbps/384 Kbps 50ms RTT), and Mumbai, India using a 56K dial-up connection (19/30 Kbps 120ms RTT). Lastly I ran a test on WebPagetest using a mobile device Galaxy S7, with the Chrome browser again, over a mobile LTE connection (12 Mbps/12Mbos 70ms RTT). All four are presented below. (Each one is a link to the WebPateTest results page for that test.)

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