The Daily Sucker

Andrew King wrote a great book called Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization, which is now out of print. Well, he has a new book coming out called, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine, & Conversion Rate Secrets. You have to love the title.

Andrew has an interesting article on his site called Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003, which is something that shouldn’t surprise any of us. Here’s a summary of the article:

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, dial-up users have been left behind.

Actually, I think the situation is worse than the research indicates. There’s a popular web site that calculates page size, makeup of the page (HTML graphics, HTML, multimedia, CSS, CSS graphics), and download times. I wanted to see how large Microsoft’s home page was and received an answer of 149, 655 bytes. Then I ran Charles, a program I’ve discussed before and it said the total page size of Microsoft’s home page was 654.54 KB (or roughly 670, 248 bytes). Hmm, math isn’t my strong point, but I think this means Microsoft’s home page something like 4.5x as large as commonly believed.

Yikes.

Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003