Total Page Size - What is your rule of thumb?

[WiseBuddha]

Way back then in 2001 I posted the following thread asking forum members what their personal preferences were in relation to total page size (including images, markup, css, jscript etc etc):

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16039

This thread is now 7 years old, and technology has moved on, broadband connections are the norm, and the bandwidth available on these when compared to 2001 is considerably higher.

Back in 2001 the general consensus was 30k to 60k, how about today?

[AutisticCuckoo]

technology has moved on, broadband connections are the norm

Are they? Not in all parts of the world. Also, mobile surfing is becoming more common, and those connections often have limited bandwidth.

[WiseBuddha]

Are they? Not in all parts of the world. Also, mobile surfing is becoming more common, and those connections often have limited bandwidth.

Fair point, however I don't think I am wrong in saying that the majority of sites are not coded with this kind of support as a primary design constraint. Those sites that are expecting "mobile" users typically provide a stripped down version of the site.

As an example, this thread page alone is over 200k

- 163k of JS files
- 35k of images
- 27k of CSS.
- 60k+ for HTML

Back then in 2001, the 35k used by images alone, would have been an acceptable maximum for the entire page.

Maybe a dynamic page such as a forum thread is a bad example, so take http://www.apache.org. This currently comes in at just over 70kb, 36kb of which is an embedded jpg image.

[DaveWoods]

Whilst a lot of people have switched to broadband, there's still a lot of users who haven't so I don't think we should be forgetting dial-up users and going for the 1mb flash websites just yet.

As designers we should always be supporting the older technology, whether that be dial-up, Internet Explorer 6 or 800x600 resolutions.

Websites in general have got larger in-size and therefore the patience of dial-up users may have increased as they realise they're using outdated technology but I'm sure there aren't many of them that would hang about waiting for a 2mb flash website to load up.

I'd probably aim to be no larger than around 100kb in size.

Admittedly, the links in my sig are 160kb, 118kb and 247kb but in all of these instances they majority of this is taken up by a header image that is repeated across the site and therefore caching obviously comes into play with resulting page hits being much quicker. (The 247kb has a 147kb header for example.)

It does obviously depend on your target market but as with all accessibility, if you want to reach as many people as possible then you should consider all types of users, not just the majority.

[WiseBuddha]

I'd probably aim to be no larger than around 100mb in size.

Freudian slip

[BJ Duncan]

"MORE IS LESS" appears to be a very good rule of design and I feel it is just as good for the initial contact with a client via your website. With many of the forums and books that I have read about web design, majority of them say that you only have about 10 seconds to impress your visitor before they leave.

However, within saying that, I am a small business and also a firm believer that an existing client is evermore valueable then a visitor. I always try my best to please the clients I currently have as they are the one recommending my business (nothing beats the good ol' 'word of mouth'), rather than try anything to 'hopefully' get a new client.

In conclusion, to answer the question directly, I just try to make the page communicate the most amount of information with the minimal amount of memory required. Apply the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) method and it gives an across the board good rating for all who view your site. Most of my pages are within the range of 30 - 60KB

[DaveWoods]

Freudian slip

Yep, I obviously meant 100kb which I've now edited

[Dan Schulz]

The technology may be out dated but in some cases it's all we have.

Take me for example. I live just west of Chicago (in Aurora, Illinois). You'd think I'd have a cable connection but I don't for two reasons. One, I don't like Comcast (that, and I don't want to pay upwards of $60/month for cable internet). Two, the landline phone is not in my name (that, combined with the landlord covering the electric and water, leaving me with the gas bill). And guess who the phone company is? If you said Ma Bell (AT&T), you're wrong. It's Comcast. Ugh.

I need to find a new apartment.

[felgall]

People on faster connections also expect pages to load faster.

Back in the early 80s I was told that if an online program took over two seconds to respond then the program was too slow and would need to be rewritten. I think that two second rule is still a good one and with the faster connections that many people are now using you can actually achieve web pages with around 40 - 80k of content that will load within that timeframe.

[bluedreamer]

People on faster connections also expect pages to load faster.

Too true, because connections have got faster, peoples waiting threshold has gone down. With dialup, surfers would happily wait 10-20 seconds for a page to load, whereas with fast connections you have a second or so to make an impact - depending where you read, this can be 1/2 second or less!

It stands to reason that you should always aim to make your page sizes as small as possible. I see a lot of 500kb + pages nowadays and they load relatively slowly for my 8mb connection, 5-10 seconds is not uncommon and by that time I've lost patience and clicked the back button.

I still aim to make page sizes no more than 100k, but i will flex to about 200k if it's justified.

[Chas]

Thought I'd bring this back up as I've been looking into total homepage sizes for popular sites. It's interesting to see how things have changed over the last eight years.

Based on the way back machine - Amazon's total home page size went from 125k in 2000 to 1.34meg today.

Google.co.uk - 15k
Search.yahoo.com - 20k
BBC.co.uk - 400k
CNN.com - 884k
Ebay.com - 414k
Amazon.com 1.34meg

[Spencer F.]

Based on the way back machine - Amazon's total home page size went from 125k in 2000 to 1.34meg today.

Google.co.uk - 15k
Search.yahoo.com - 20k
BBC.co.uk - 400k
CNN.com - 884k
Ebay.com - 414k
Amazon.com 1.34meg

Cool facts. Amazon is definitely bloated, but people visiting it are typically from the U.S. -- keep in mind Amazon has other websites for other countries -- and more than enough people have fast connections in the U.S. to justify that home page size.

[logic_earth]

and more than enough people have fast connections in the U.S. to justify that home page size.

Umm...sadly no, the US doesn't even reach the top 10 countries where broadband is widespread. We have the worst infrastructure for broadband its depressing.

[johnyboy]

> Amazon's total home page size [is] 1.34meg

you are joking?! unreal. amazon do serve up different things for different users though, for example when i was looking into ways of dealing with mobile devices i found that if you accessed amazon.com with a mobile you got a stunningly stripped down small web page. so maybe amazon are doing detection of some sort (they definitely are, or at least were when i looked, for mobiles, but maybe they're doing further/more than that): fast broadband, graphics flash etc. intensive, dial up, graphics but light, mobile, next to no graphics (and, btw, totally invalid html in order to shave off size, e.g. no doctype, the html is in this post: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show...53&postcount=3 ).

if you have the resources which amazon obviously do, isn't that the best thing to do? (if it's possible that is). detect what kind of speed and adjust content appropriately.

this isn't just a speed thing though is it? as speeds get faster that allows things which were out of the question before to be done; streaming video for example.

also, broadband doesn't necessarily mean super fast. i live in the uk and my apparently 8mb connection is not very fast (*nowhere* near 8mb. not even 1mb although i'm not completely sure on that). it is significantly faster than dial up but i'm sure compared to good, proper broadband speed it's slow.

[Spencer F.]

Umm...sadly no, the US doesn't even reach the top 10 countries where broadband is widespread. We have the worst infrastructure for broadband its depressing.

I know that the U.S. is behind other countries in broadband activity. But, the overall numbers mean nothing. You need to look beyond the surface of the numbers. The crucial fact is that the U.S. spends more money online than any other country out there. The vast majority of those users spending money are people with fast connections. Grandma with her modem isn't spending money online and isn't browsing Amazon or other "heavy" websites. The numbers are skewed, because they include people like grandma who may have an Internet connection, but probably doesn't even use it.

You need to look at users that matter and not overall numbers, which many webmasters fail to take into consideration. I'd much rather convert 25% of 1,000 visitors than 0.01% of 5,000 users. Just as people need to look beyond the surface of the broadband activity in the U.S., they need to also look into who's actually viewing their website.

[logic_earth]

^ So dialup users never buy anything on the internet?
Thats hard to believe.

[felgall]

The numbers are skewed because people on slower connections avoid web sites with huge 100k+ web pages.

If a page doesn't load in a couple of seconds on my broadband connection I generally move on since I have too many things to do and no time to waste on slow loading web pages.

[Spencer F.]

^ So dialup users never buy anything on the internet?
Thats hard to believe.

Did you read what I wrote?

I'm talking about the majority here.

[logic_earth]

I read what you wrote, but in your statement you made it sound like only grandma is on a dialup connection. I would like to believe you that the majority is on high speed. However, that is just not true, the majority is still on dialup.

[Dan Schulz]

logic_earth is right. Especially when you consider the fact that many parts of the United States (such as much of New England, Appalachia, and the Northwest) simply isn't wired for broadband (it's either dialup from the local phone company or satellite) because (and get this) it's not economical for the telecommunications industry to lay down all that cable or FIOS (and DSL just doesn't cut it in those areas anyway from what I understand).