How can I reduce bandwidth usage when web scraping?

Reducing bandwidth lowers costs and improves scraping performance.

1. Block unnecessary resources:

Most pages load resources you don't need:

Images: Often 60-80% of page size
Videos and GIFs: Can be massive
Fonts: Rarely needed for data extraction
Analytics scripts: Never needed for scraping
Ads: Pure waste for scrapers

Implementation:

In Puppeteer/Playwright:

await page.setRequestInterception(true);
page.on('request', (req) => {
  const resourceType = req.resourceType();
  if (['image', 'stylesheet', 'font'].includes(resourceType)) {
    req.abort();
  } else {
    req.continue();
  }
});

await page.setRequestInterception(true);
page.on('request', (req) => {
  const resourceType = req.resourceType();
  if (['image', 'stylesheet', 'font'].includes(resourceType)) {
    req.abort();
  } else {
    req.continue();
  }
});

2. Use the right tool for the job:

API endpoints: 1-5 KB per request
HTTP requests (requests/curl): 10-100 KB
Headless browser with blocking: 100-500 KB
Full headless browser: 1-10 MB

Always use the simplest approach that works.

3. Implement smart caching:

Cache static resources (CSS, JS)
Store already-scraped pages
Use conditional requests (If-Modified-Since headers)
Implement database lookups before re-scraping

4. Compress requests and responses:

Most servers support gzip/brotli compression:

headers = {'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br'}

headers = {'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br'}

This can reduce text content by 70-90%.

5. Scrape only what you need:

Don't load the homepage if you just need product pages
Use direct URLs when possible
Skip unnecessary navigation steps

6. Optimize retry logic:

Implement exponential backoff
Don't retry on 404s (permanent failures)
Set reasonable timeout limits

Real-world impact:

A typical optimization workflow reduces bandwidth by 80-95%, turning a $10,000/month project into $500-2,000/month.

How can I reduce bandwidth usage when web scraping?

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