Piling on the webpage calories

Now broadband is commonplace, webpages can easily contain more code, more images, more animations and the odd video clip because it will all download in a nano-second? If only that was the case. Not everybody is on broadband yet and even if they are speeds vary wildly and at peak times surfing web pages can slow to a fast crawl.

So I undertook a quick survey of my peers corporate websites in and around Southend-on-Sea, Essex. I was shocked to find the huge page sizes some website designers are racking up on their own home pages. Way back in the dawn of website design we were all taught to keep file sizes to a minimum by writing lean code, optimising images and generally keeping our web pages economical and to the point.

I use a great website called websiteoptimization.com (others are available) to check out the total size of a web page. It’s not just the actual webpage itself i.e. index.html that affects the size and therefore the download speed but all the elements that are attached to the page such as images and external files like styleshheets, javascript and the like. And all these elements have to be downloaded and read by your browser in order for the page to load fully and display properly.

Now for the figures. The largest home page of a local website design company weighed in at a whopping 466kb with others piling on the calories at 208kb, 466kb, 246kb, 275kb, 325k and 147kb. This is just the home page, not the total site. And the results are from a selection of websites on the first page of a Google search of local website designers in southend on todays date.

And at the leaner end of the scale I found home pages sizes of just 7kb (well this website is currently in development and only contained a couple of very small images so can’t really be counted), 73kb and 91kb.

Ok, www.areoff.com weighs in at just 43kb, but that’s primarily because there are very few images on the home page. This conscious strategy was not primarily to reduce file size and download speed but it is a positive side effect of our website design method.

So what about the sites we design for our clients? It’s all well and good me boasting about how lean and mean our own website is. Well, even for websites that are graphically rich the story is still positive. If you take a look at our client’s website The Meat Emporium it only weighs in at 88kb. Not bad when you get to look at those tasty but very calorific sausages! Take a look at another of our clients websites at British Insurance. This weighs in at 177kb but around 70kb of this is analytics code which isn’t actually served by their website at all but comes from an external website. So the effective size of this page is around 100kb. Again, quite impressive when you consider that there are a few logos including a fairly prominent awards logos image.

Why am I focusing on an analysis of home pages? Well, the home page of your website is where most of your visitors will first experience your website. If you fulfill the crucial usability criteria of ‘fast download speed’ then your visitors will then be willing to experience a longer download time on more complex pages throughout your site (but still within reasonable page size limits). This is because the home page will have answered their initial question ‘does this site seem relevant to my needs?’ and will therefore be willing to invest more time and effort in looking at the other pages of your site.

Check out the size of your home page using a webpage optimisation tool like this and if it’s over say 100-150kb then ask your web designer what can be done to reduce the size of this most crucial page on your website.

Contact us and we will take a look at your website and give you a free consultation on how your website can be optimized so it’s leaner and fitter. Presenting your users with the information they need about your business in just a second or two rather than several can be crucial to converting internet grazers into to product munching customers.