How Much Do Your Web Pages Weigh?

On the Sitepoint website, Craig Buckler points out how “Average Page Weights Increase by 32% in 2013“.

Total Transfer Size and Total Requests
for the period 2012-12-15 to 2013-12-15
(Source: HTTP Archive – Trends)

Craig is not impressed with the numbers, and tries to find the reasons behind the increase. Bloated CMS templates and carelessness (sloppiness?) by the developers may well explain a large part of the phenomenon, but it’s hard to get a real explanation from averages only; more detailed research is required.

By the way, Craig: there’s a difference between an average and a median. When talking averages, there’s no way to tell how many samples are smaller or bigger than the average. So you can’t say: “Approximately half the web sites analyzed will be more obese“…

Going to the source of the data, i.e. the Trends page on the HTTP Archive site, there’s even worse news. If I interpret the “Doc Size & DOM Elements” statistic correctly, there is actually less content in a page than a year ago. So web sites are using more bits to tell less? I guess there’s another possible explanation: advertising may well be pushing out the page content.

Anyway you look at it, the statistics are sobering for us web developers. As Craig correctly notes: “Mobile connectivity and bandwidth continues to improve but it rarely jumps 30% in one year“. That means that web developers are not thinking “mobile”, despite the success of mobile hardware!

If you’re contemplating to (re-)build a web site, you had better make sure that your developers are aware of these statistics – your users might be disappointed if the developers don’t heed the lessons that can be learned from the numbers.