Average Web Page Approaches 1MB

MrSeb writes "According to new research from HTTP Archive, which regularly scans the internet's most popular destinations, the average size of a single web page is now 965 kilobytes, up more than 30% from last year's average of 702KB. This rapid growth is fairly normal for the internet — the average web page was 14KB in 1995, 93KB by 2003, and 300KB in 2008 — but by burrowing a little deeper into HTTP Archive's recent data, we can discern some interesting trends. Between 2010 and 2011, the average amount of Flash content downloaded stayed exactly the same — 90KB — but JavaScript experienced massive growth from 113KB to 172KB. The amount of HTML, CSS, and images on websites also showed a significant increase year over year. There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts." If you have a personal home page, how big is it?

Comments

Please remember the dial-up users...

[MetricT]

and the 3G users, and the satellite users, and everyone else that has a low-bandwidth and/or high cost per byte connection.

My parents can't get DSL or cable. They're stuck with 22k dial-up, and use AdBlock Plus, NoFlash, and Propel accelerator with compression set to the point where you can barely recognize photos, and it still takes 2 minutes for a reasonably normal page (CNN, MSNBC) to load, much less anything with a ton of Javascript or Flash.

Can't websites automatically detect connection speed the first time a client visits, and store a cookie so that us slow people get a nice, simple website?

Oh, and Propel, please move to JPEG2000 and XZ compression. Some people need every byte they can get.

Re:Not surprised

[TheSpoom]

Yup. Google helps us out here. If we're using offsite resources like that, there's a fair likelihood that it's cached in the user's browser even if it's the first time they've visited the site.