Does size matter?

[Zygoma]

http://www.113foodscan.com/ibs/index.html

Please could someone point me towards a resource that can tell me if the above web page is too big and do people agree the standard file size for a web page is 30mb?

[croatiankid]

30mb? that would take minutes to download via (a)dsl, not to mention hours via dial-up.

I like to keep my pages (and all images, scripts etc) under 20 or 30 kb, any more and I don't like it, although I prob won't ditch it if it's under 40 kb. You should know about your target audience, what's the majority using. Then you must determine for yourself how long you'll make the dial-up users wait.

[c2uk]

Personally, I would say size doesn't matter any more that much. I also would say there is no such thing as a standard file size for a web page (that is a single page with it's external objects such as images or multimedia files), whatever you mean with that, but it would definitely not be 30 MegaByte, rather 30 KiloByte.

In your case, however, I would argue whether you really need this image as a Flash object, does Flash offer here anything additionally? If not use an image with a proper alt and title tag and might be able to decrease the file size a little bit, also in terms of accessibility and SEO.

You can also get a speed analysis from here:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/s...ibs/index.html (seems to work only sporadically)

[Dan Schulz]

People wonder why I love Jack Daniels... oh wait, wrong topic.

Anyway, www.ilovejackdaniels.com has a dialup emulator you can use to test your sites on. It's not my site, just so you know, but when I do get a broadband connection (I'm currently on 56k dialup myself), I'll be using this for testing purposes:
http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/reso...odem-emulator/

[DreyerMedia]

If you mean the total of all your sites, it doesn't mather as long as you divide the size into many pages

[c2uk]

@Dan
Nice tool and you can get a feeling for load time but it doesn't seem to like flash, and that's the biggest portion of his page.

[AutisticCuckoo]

Yes, size does matter for those of us who have no choice but dial-up, and for those of us who sometimes use a GSM or GPRS phone for surfing.

How much it matters depends on what is making the file so big. If it's a lot of content (information) then I don't mind waiting, but if it's 'unnecessary' fluff like images, animation and advertisements then I'll often hit the Back button.

A high-content page like a discussion thread on SitePoint can take 10-20 seconds to load on dial-up, but it's worth waiting for. A highly 'designed' site with little content is not.

[Zygoma]

Great replies but isnt there a tool out there where you type in your URL it then calculates the file size an ranks features as good / bad. I remeber using it ages ago - it might have been a feature thru W3C or firefox. I know this sounds a bit like a treasure hunt but if someone has got it you'd put a smile on a fellow webbie...

[AutisticCuckoo]

The Info panel that is built into Opera will tell you the total file size (main page size, number of inline elements and total size of inline elements).

I've also put a Total Size display in the status bar, along with an Elapsed Time counter and a Connection Speed display. (All standard components.)

Whether a certain page size is good or bad depends on the site and the intended audience. A photographer's portfolio is more or less expected to be heavy. A page that allows dial-up users to check if they are eligible for broadband or ADSL should be much lighter.

[c2uk]

Great replies but isnt there a tool out there where you type in your URL it then calculates the file size an ranks features as good / bad. I remeber using it ages ago - it might have been a feature thru W3C or firefox. I know this sounds a bit like a treasure hunt but if someone has got it you'd put a smile on a fellow webbie...

Did you see my link? That's exactly what this does! You need to be patient with that though.

[Zygoma]

Did you see my link? That's exactly what this does! You need to be patient with that though.

Excellent yes - this was the tool I used & thank you for all other solutions offered..

[SimplyFu]

unless you use any content delivery network similar to what those big internet player use (e.g. Yahoo).

[xhtmlcoder]

Available Bandwidth and throughput matters, size is subjective.

[ryanhellyer]

... isnt there a tool out there where you type in your URL it then calculates the file size an ranks features as good / bad. I remeber using it ages ago - it might have been a feature thru W3C or firefox.

Just install the Firefox Web Developers toolbar, it has a download size option in the menu which tells you your total download size, plus breaks it down into images, documents, scripts and a few other things I think. I use it every day, it's extremely useful.

As for a standard web page size? Well how long is a piece of string? I'm at work so can't look at the size of the example site you gave easily. But I'd guess that should be somewhere in the vicinity of 40 kB or so.

The main thing you need to do is make sure your code is as compact as possible and that your images are compressed appropriately. Don't use GIFs unless you need transparency or animations, use PNGs instead and always use JPEGs for photos or anything which wont show up compression errors badly.

As a vague guide, I usually recommend pages being under 150 kB, but that's pretty rough as the site you've shown above definitely shouldn't be anything like 150 kB as it's way too simple. Graphics heavy or scripting heavy pages may need to be 150 kB, but definitely not simple pages. Hope that's of some help

cheers,
Ryan

[Adam A Flynn]

Just install the Firefox Web Developers toolbar, it has a download size option in the menu which tells you your total download size, plus breaks it down into images, documents, scripts and a few other things I think. I use it every day, it's extremely useful.

Saw this thread and was just about to post the exact same thing. One of the nifty features of the Developers Toolbar is (among dozens of other nifty things) the ability to see a page's filesize, categorized by image, text, object, etc, and broken down by file. So you can quickly see how big it is and where the size is coming from.

[kleineme]

Great replies but isnt there a tool out there where you type in your URL it then calculates the file size an ranks features as good / bad. I remeber using it ages ago - it might have been a feature thru W3C or firefox. I know this sounds a bit like a treasure hunt but if someone has got it you'd put a smile on a fellow webbie...

do you mean something like this?

[joebert]

I've also put a Total Size display in the status bar, along with an Elapsed Time counter and a Connection Speed display. (All standard components.)

All great toolbar buttons, I use the Speed & Total indicators myself.

It's worth mentioning that the Total tracker will only count inline element size if thoose elements aren't cached in V9.20.
If you have a 20KB page, & 80KB worth of images/ect, it will show 100KB when you load it, then 20KB if you load the page before your cache expires.

[Stormrider]

The web developer toolbar reports the size as 15kb. This is wrong, it isn't counting the flash movie (incidentally, I have no IDEA why on earth you decided to use a flash movie for that, it is just an image!). The flash movie is 47kb, bringing the total size to 62kb. Firebug is what I use for finding the size, it reports it correctly, and shows you load times as well. Very useful.

I would agree with whoever said take out the flash movie and use an image. You will save a LOT of space doing that, you can definitely get that image down to much less than 47kb!

[Dr John]

I've used this site several times
http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/zd_dev/
It gives a dial-up download time of 5.6 seconds, which would suggest it is not noticing the Flash, unlike the other site recommended.

For future reference, find total size of all the files in kB and divide by 6 to get a typical dial-up time.
So ryanhellyer' 150Kb page would take about 25 sec on a dial-up.
And dial-up is still used by around 25% of users.

[Dan Schulz]

And I'm one of those dialup users.

[komodo9]

I try to keep my pages under 80-100k. Adding a little meat to them doesn't hurt anything IMO.

[World Wide Weird]

I don't worry too much about file sizes anymore. I start by making my templates and layout images as small as possible. If the content for a particular page happens to be larger than average, it's probably for a good reason, and those who are truly interested in viewing it shouldn't mind waiting a few seconds.

...www.ilovejackdaniels.com has a dialup emulator you can use to test your sites on.

The emulator didn't download my CSS images.

[tanjh]

Time of loading must always be taken into consideration, IMO

[World Wide Weird]

Mods! Spam!!! ^^^

[solutioncreative]

i would keep my webpages to be less then 30kb in size. 30mb is way too large for a single page.