One Unused Font File Was Eating 21% of a Hotel's Bandwidth

A resort we maintain got a warning from Webflow: bandwidth was at 229GB against a 200GB plan limit. High season, when EU and US travelers push traffic up further, was months away. The obvious answer was to pay for the bigger plan.

Before recommending that, I looked at where the bandwidth was actually going.

The find

One font file. NotoSerif-VariableFont_wdth,wght.ttf, uploaded into the site's custom fonts, consuming 49.42GB a month. That is 21 percent of total bandwidth from a single file.

The site did not even use it. It was a secondary brand font, uploaded once, forgotten, and served to every visitor on every page load since.

The fix took a day to find and minutes to apply: serve the font from Google Fonts, which Webflow does not count against bandwidth, and delete the uploaded file.

The rest of the leak

The font was the headline, and there was more underneath.

The site had no caching layer. Every visitor, every repeat visitor, every bot hit Webflow's origin directly and burned metered bandwidth. So we put Cloudflare in front:

• Images and assets cached at edge servers near the visitor (Bangkok, Singapore), so repeat loads stop touching the origin
• Images auto-converted to WebP and AVIF, which cut their size before they travel
• Bot Fight Mode on, because crawlers were inflating the numbers for no one's benefit

Daily bandwidth dropped from around 6GB to 3.5GB. Before we even published the font fix.

The result

The property stayed on the same Webflow plan through high season. No upgrade, no overage. The same pass took mobile PageSpeed from 56 into the 90s, on a site where Microsoft Clarity shows 90 percent of sessions on mobile.

What to take from this

If your hosting bill is creeping up, the answer is rarely "pay for more." Bandwidth has a shape. Something specific is consuming it, and hosting dashboards will show you what if you look at per-asset numbers.

Check three things on your own site this week:

1. Custom fonts uploaded to your host that also exist on Google Fonts. Serve them from Google Fonts.
2. A caching layer. If visitors in Bangkok are pulling assets from a US origin on every load, Cloudflare's free plan fixes that.
3. Bot traffic. If you have never blocked crawlers, part of your bandwidth bill is robots reading your homepage.

So before you accept the upgrade your host suggests, find out what you are actually paying to serve. It might be a font nobody sees.