Report: Web Pages are Getting More Bloated, Average Size is Up 25% From Last Year
Our browsers are getting faster and so are our Internet connections, but in parallel to this, the web pages we access are actually getting bigger, too. According to uptime monitoring service Pingdom, the average website grew an astonishing 25% over the last year. The main culprits here are images and JavaScript. Images now weigh in at 451 kB on the average web page, an increase of 21% compared to the 372 kB Pingdom recorded 12 months ago. While they are smaller on average than images, the size of the average JavaScript files on a web page is now 149 kB, up 45% from last year.
The average web page now clocks in at 980 KB and it takes about 87 requests to load those pages.
As developers now focus more on adding interactive elements to their sites with the help of HTML5 and JavaScript, the size of these files will likely continue to increase. For most broadband users, these increases won’t really make any practical difference. On slower 3G connections, though, and for those who still use dial-up connections, these increases are meaningful.
Pingdom notes that “size optimization seems to have gone out the window pretty much across the board.” Given how easy it is to at least compress images more effectively and maybe minify the JavaScript and CSS on a site, it’s a shame that so many developers and publishers don’t seem to do so (and yes, looking at our site here, we could definitely do some more of that as well).