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Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the just-the-freshmen-fifteen dept.

Andy King writes "Within the last five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has nearly doubled. While broadband users have experienced somewhat faster response times, narrowband users have been left behind." The article breaks down a number of changes besides just page size, including image types and video duration.

3 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Check out the size of the /. front page. by jandrese · · Score: 4, Interesting

    IIRC, that's actually smaller than it was before the 2.0 makeover. Before that you have to look back a long way to find a thinner and lighter Slashdot. Probably back before the sidebar was added. Slashdot has always been a fairly heavy website unless you use the lite mode, but at least it has a lot of content so that's not such a bad thing.

    The biggest thing I'd argue is that advertisements have gotten heavier over the years, with static images giving way to animated images giving way to flash objects.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
  2. Parkinson's Law hold true after 60 years by benwiggy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    So, we've gone from "work expands to fill the time/space available" to "Internet expands to fill the bandwidth available".

    Whatever next? Software expands to fill the hardware available....?

  3. Re:Times change by Albanach · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In my opinion it would be unfeasible to maintain two sites, one for narrow band users and one for high speed users.

    It might be extra work, might even be a pita, but 'unfeasible'? Most modern websites of any size separate content from presentation through some sort of content management system.
     
    With a decent CMS it should be trivial to offer a 'light' version of your site - I think someone else mentioned the low graphics version of the BBC news site as an example.
     
    It is possible that a lot of the content that is increasing page sizes are flash adverts - if I fire up internet explorer there seems to be an ever increasing number of these animated adverts (can folk actually read a web page with three animated adverts amongst the text?). I'd hazard a guess that the reason many sites don't offer light versions of their pages is the threat to revenue through decreased ad views and has very little to do with the complexity of serving up two variants of a website.