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

How Big?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's rather personal.

Re:How Big?

[Pharmboy]

Well, I don't mind bragging about mine. I was 100k, but now has swollen to 150k this year. As to *real* servers, I try to keep our ecommerce pages below 250k for gateway pages. Until this year, I tried to keep them under 150k. Up until 2008, 100k was the target. Before 2003, 50k. This is kind of light, and a few pages bust this, but very few. Before 2000, I used to spend lots of time just optimizing graphics, now I just use some common sense, PS, and very little time.

What I have found is that the total k of data isn't as important as the number of items and hosts the page calls. I find I can make my pages faster by using image maps, which make larger images size (12 images 1 image of all 12 items) but load faster because it takes less connects. There are a few tools online that can help you figure out total load times. Nowadays, load time is NOT purely a function of the size of the data. If you can cut down on the number of GETS and cross domain GETS (ie: DNS lookups) you can radically cut down load time and reliability.

Also, pages that don't need to be dynamic, shouldn't be. Our gateway (to product categories) pages are generated as we update the site, and stored static. This allows them to be cached. It sounds old fashioned, but the fact is that it greatly increases perceived latency. I am amazed at how many websites are generated via PHP and SQL on the fly, yet aren't updated more than a couple times a day or less. That is a lot of wasted CPU cycles on the server, and a lot of wasted potential for caching, both locally and down the line. And yes, it makes your website load slower, making it seem like your pages are larger than they are.

can't wait to see these on my phone!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good thing phone carriers don't limit your data consumption....

oh wait..

Missing data

[instagib]

Average information content - does a page view give me more insight as a user now than it did 10 years ago?

Re:Missing data

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years ago online video was virtually nonexistent, and where it did exist it was never larger than 320x240. Pictures were equally low resolution and page formatting was minimal. Allowing user comments was rare, and user contribution based sites like YouTube and Wikipedia were nonexistent. Oh yea, and the "blink" tag was still popular. So yes, I would say the amount of information has increased significantly.

Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

And.... when running AdBlock Plus, this figure goes down to 100kB. I run AdBlock mostly for the massive speed increase that comes with it.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Web developers don't care because the majority of their images/css/js is cacheable by each visitor (and most people have jQuery cached from the official site and many sites link to that directly). 1MB page but it's only 45k on the next visit.

Larger Pages

[Master Moose]

And Less Content. .

I remeber the days when a site would include an 10 paragraph article on one page - Not 10 pages with a paragraph on each.

No, it's not HTML5. It's just junk.

[Animats]

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.

No, it's not about HTML 5. A lot of it is about bloated content management systems and templates.

I was looking at a Wall Street Journal page recently, and I brought it into an HTML editor so I could eliminate all non-story content. The story required an HTML page with only 72 lines. The original page was over 4000 lines. It contained a vast amount of hidden content, including the entire registration system for buying a subscription. All that junk appears on every page.. Inline, not in an included file.

On top of that, there are content management systems which create a custom CSS page for each content page. So there's no useful caching in the browser.

Remember those people who said CSS was going to make web pages shorter? They were wrong. Look at Slashdot - bloated, slow pages that don't do much, yet consume CPU time when idle.

Re:Hallelujah

[g0bshiTe]

It's not the size of your homepage, it's how you use it.

Re:Not surprised

[webnut77]

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.

And then Google also gets to look at the referrer data.