As with any capital investment or expenditure, your inbound marketing campaign is subject to budgetary considerations. You’re always looking for ways to save on content creation, distribution and promotion, but with the understanding that quality must not be sacrificed for the benefit of cost. If there are ways to reduce your content and video delivery expenses, you’re probably willing to at least listen to what’s involved and how you can take advantage of technology.

Server-side compression is one such tactic that can be used to decrease the costs involved with distributing marketing content. A primer course will give an idea of how you can implement this type of solution, which will not only trim your marketing budget, but also speed up delivery online and via mobile devices.

Server-Side Compression 101

What is server-side compression?

Without getting overly technical, server-side compression is operability that can be built into web servers to boost transfer speed and enhance bandwidth. Essentially, it decreases load time for your webpage, speeding the transfer of your text, images, video and other content. Your data is compressed before it’s sent from the server, then downloaded by compliant browsers.

What are the cost savings to using server-side compression?

Server-side compression reduces your costs in terms of bandwidth, i.e., the level of traffic travelling between your site, users and the Internet. A web hosting company will offer a certain level of bandwidth for your site, which you pay for according to your needs. The following equation will help you determine how much bandwidth is necessary, calculated on a daily basis:

Visitors x Page Views x Average Page Size x Tolerance Number (room for error)

With server-side compression, you’ll need to procure less total bandwidth from your web hosting company – which will result in a lower cost to deliver the same amount of content and video.

Does server-side compression speed up mobile delivery?

Compression does result in quicker page downloads and content transfer for mobile devices, so long as the right environment exists on the client side. When you consider the enormous number of users that access the Internet via mobile devices, it’s important that you provide them with the quick streaming achieved by server-side compression.

Another Advantage to Server-Side Compression

Besides cost, there is another significant benefit to implementing server-side compression: searchability. The Google Algorithm ranks pages with faster load times higher on the search engine results page, leading to more clicks for those sites at the top of the list. The company includes site speed in the search engine algorithm in order to provide a better experience for those using Google, including your target audience.

When you’re looking to lower costs in your marketing department, delivery of online content and video should be one of the first places you focus on. With server-side compression, you can save costs and stream content faster at the same time. Even better, you’re delivering your content to mobile users, a group that sometimes suffers when it comes to download speeds. If you and your IT department haven’t already considered the benefits, it’s time to get started.