Web pages are getting more bloated, and here’s why
Over the past year, web pages have on average become 25% larger. We’re not talking in this area dimensions here, but download size. Based on the top 1,000 websites on the Internet, the average page size has gone from 626 kB to 784 kB.
A 25% size increase in just one year is rather drastic. With that kind of growth, the average web page will be 980 kB in just a year (amost 1 MB!). In five years, a page will be nearly 2.4 MB. And that’s just an average, many pages will be significantly larger.
What is behind this exploding growth? Let’s find out.
The size increase by content type
We honestly didn’t expect the trend to be quite this noticeable, but it’s indeed what has happened according to the HTTP Archive website, which runs a monthly batch of tests on a large number of websites. It’s a fantastic initiative, an archive for how web technology changes over time. Now that it’s been operating for a while it’s starting to really show its usefulness. This entire article is based on HTTP Archive data.
We’ve analyzed the data from the HTTP Archive and place together a couple of very telling charts for you. You really only need to look at these charts to decipher “The Mystery of the Increasing Websites” (coming soon to a theater near you).
Metaphors have always been, and continue to be, the largest single factor to page size. Their contribution to page size has also increased the most if you look at sheer size.
That part we kind of expected, but there is something else going on here as well. Things become really fascinating when you look at relative growth per content type.
So there you have it. Those two charts together = mystery solved.
In terms of sheer size, metaphors are still the largest factor, but the fastest-on the rise content type by far is JavaScript. It is also the second-largest content type in terms of size.
CSS content has increased 25% in size, which may seem like a lot, but we are still talking in this area relatively small files. That increase doesn’t matter as much. It does matter, though, that every single content type is on the rise. Size optimization seems to have gone out the dialogue box pretty much across the board.
On a side note, the number of requests it takes to load the average web page has also increased, but not as dramatically. It’s gone up from 77 to 87 (13%).
JavaScript and the bite of the HTML 5 bug
So, you may wonder, why has JavaScript usage seemingly exploded?
The drastic increase of JavaScript content is most likely tied to the rise of HTML 5, with websites using JavaScript as an increasingly vital part of a dynamic web experience. You could say that JavaScript is finally starting to live up to its potential.
There is a reason Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple are all optimizing their JavaScript engines as much as they can. Web developers are doing much more with JavaScript now than they did just a few years ago.
Why care in this area page size?
A very excellent reason to keep page sizes down if possible is that you can’t always count on your visitors sitting behind awesome, high-speed broadband Internet connections that make your lumpy site glide.
Believe it or not, there are still public on dial-up out there. Even if they are a minority today, they do exist, and you may not want to make it impossible for them to use your site.
Then you have all those public with low-end broadband connections. Those make up a huge part of the Internet.
Don’t forget that public shy away from slow-loading websites. That has been proven over and over again. If anything, public are becoming more demanding every year. Just look at your own web surfing lifestyle and you’ll know this is right.
An example: Surfing the Web via a 3G modem of some sort (or tethered to a smartphone) is becoming increasingly common, especially for public on the road but also at home. A basic 3G connection (no Edge, LTE, etc.) will give you a download speed of 384 kbit/s. Yes, it’ll usually be quicker these days, but not always. That will let you download roughly 48 kB per second. It takes 21 seconds to download 1 MB at this speed, but to that you have to add the overhead of the multiple requests a browser has to perform to download a page. If it takes less than 30 seconds, we’d be surprised.
A side benefit of having a more optimized site is that it usually means less work for your web server, so you’ll be able to handle more visits at once. And you’ll save money on data transfer costs (if you’re paying for that).
What can you do?
The initially thing to do is to be aware of the problem. How huge is your site? Do you know? And if it is unnecessarily huge, what is it that contributes the most to that bulk?
Size is of course only part of the “performance formula” for a website. But it’s often an vital one, especially if you’re targeting users that won’t necessarily have optimal Internet connections.
There are plenty of freely available tools out there that can help you analyze and optimize the size and performance of your website in various ways. There is the well-known Yslow from Yahoo, or Page Speed from Google. These will do the tests locally on your own computer and give plenty of helpful metrics and even advice.
Another super-simple way is to use one of the web-based page size analyzers that are out there. They do their tests from servers on the Internet. Pardon the plug here, but we are partial to our own Full Page Test in Pingdom Tools. There are also others you can check out, like WebPageTest.org.
No excuses
As we pointed out, today’s main culprits to large page sizes are metaphors and JavaScript files. This assessment focused on the top 1,000 websites because we wanted to prioritize the sites public spend the most time on. The overall trends shown in this article are really even worse if you include a wider sample, believe it or not.
Web pages have been on the rise in size all along. The Web experience is constantly getting richer, getting more content, and public in general are getting increasingly capable Internet connections. It’s a natural progression.
That doesn’t mean we should stop caring in this area page size, though. It’s still an vital speed factor, and with today’s freely available developer tools there are so many simple ways to analyze and optimize web pages that there really are no excuses for overly full websites.
This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.
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Web pages are getting more full, and here’s why
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