Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003

Andy King writes "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, narrowband users have been left behind." The article breaks down a number of changes besides just page size, including image types and video duration.

Check out the size of the /. front page.

Around 1/2 a megabyte. Yup. That big.

(Front Page?)

Re:Check out the size of the /. front page.

Internet access gets faster -> Web sites get bigger
Hard drives get bigger -> Applications use more space
Media storage increases -> Home videos get larger and quality improves
CPUs get faster -> Windows programmers add "features" and chow down on cycles
Fish bowls get larger -> Goldfish grow ...

Some good, some bad, some ugly. But not shocking.

Re:Check out the size of the /. front page.

Home videos get larger and quality improves

if by "quality improves" you mean resolution, I'll give you that one. But a quick glance of some of what litters youtube goes to show that 'quality' isn't going anywhere...

Re:

Oh good god yes.

Home movies have always sucked. And in HD they SUCK more. You see HD, even 1080i, requires you to pan slowly, limit zooming and other fast or shakey camera motions. now HD amplifies the careless shooting of the home video and makes peop

Re:Check out the size of the /. front page.

IIRC, that's actually smaller than it was before the 2.0 makeover. Before that you have to look back a long way to find a thinner and lighter Slashdot. Probably back before the sidebar was added. Slashdot has always been a fairly heavy website unless you use the lite mode, but at least it has a lot of content so that's not such a bad thing.

The biggest thing I'd argue is that advertisements have gotten heavier over the years, with static images giving way to animated images giving way to flash objects.

Re:

Hummmm...
I checked.
Around 75KB, down to 17KB with gzip compression.
Plus around 20KB in png/gifs.

Not that big.

Video probably prime reason...

How many web pages had embedded video as a matter of course in 2003?

It seems to me that embedded video alone could account for at least half of this increase.

You know what they say

It's not the size, it's what you do with it that counts.

Re:You know what they say

I don't know what all you other guys are browsing. I never really found legit sites that rather taistful about their adds. I have seen less adds/webpage from 2003-2008 not more. I also don't freak out everytime I see an add either. Most people who make a living of add supported websites normally are not multi-millionares. They may make an average living with their site and adds are the primary revenue and these people work full time to keep the site up to date.

Usually when sites go Add Crazy they do not last long because there is to much adds and prevents repeat visits, so they go away because they cannot make proper money from it.

Also back in the early 2000's flash wasn't used for most of the adds but animated GIFs and Flash is much more efficent then animated GIFs. So you are actually saving bandwith.

Think of the alternatives to adds. Having to Pay for directly out of own pocket for access to a web site. Web sites collecting information about you and selling them to spammers. Web sites that are a labor of love and will get updated every year if you are luckly and could go down any day.

Like it or not Web Banner Adds are actually the best happy medium that we have come up with that keep most websites running. Some websites such as HomeStarrunner.com make their mony selling swag but that may not be as profitable for other sites.

Fight: Text blasts bloat

Ok, so I'm a little retro. I've just [reluctantly] upgraded from lynx to link to get tables and table layout.

Everything still runs pretty fast, certainly much faster than those few occasions when I need graphics or https: and run Firefox. The difference is noticable on all machines, and greatest (~2x) on the slower ones.

Sometimes formatting gets messed up, but the main content is still in text and still very readable.

Parkinson's Law hold true after 60 years

So, we've gone from "work expands to fill the time/space available" to "Internet expands to fill the bandwidth available".

Whatever next? Software expands to fill the hardware available....?

Re:Parkinson's Law hold true after 60 years

Duke Nukem Forever's release date expands to fill all available time.

Avoid bloat

NoScript [noscript.net] is your friend. Avoid a lot of bloat (flash/javascript ads?), and adds some security

Narrowband?

Ugh, I hate it when people describe dial-up as "narrowband" in an attempt to sound more technical. The term "broadband" is used to describe the signal encoding, not bandwidth. Therefore the converse of "broadband is "baseband," not narrowband. The opposite of narrowband is "wideband", and refers to something else. Um, k? Glad we have that all cleared up.

Why can't they just say

Advertising on the web has tripled over the last five years? It's most definitely what's clogging the pipes...er, tubes.

!=haven't, rather == can't get (was Re:OMG !)

The U.S. is big, and there's a lot of it where the local phone connection is as good as it gets.

Low bandwidth, flexible pages using CSS are also good for people on mobile units w/ small screens.

William

Re:Times change

I wish more sites thought about narrowband users not because I myself am stuck with narrowband, but because I find that broadband-focused sites hide the pure content you want in a maze of gimmicks like Flash and needlessly dynamic HTML. Sure, in some areas (certain web applications), such features make the experience more efficient, but most of the time it is fluff.

Re:

Dynamic HTML generally doesn't take up much more bandwidth than normal HTML - a couple of extra bytes for a few CSS rules and a few lines of javascript. It makes pages feel slow and clunky because it makes the browser work harder, not because its straining

Re:

Agreed with the lite option.

I'd even go a step further.

Accessibility options. A page done almost entirely in Flash is almost guaranteed to be inaccessible to someone with a screen reader.

Another pet peeve is cropping a page so that it has only one page of

Re:Times change

"Those people in rural area's still have the ability to get high speed internet, such as satellite, direct line of site towers, cellular or even DSL."

People who don't have to deal with are very misinformed about what is available. There is no cellular or towers available. DSL isn't even remotely feasable. And sattelite is so over sold by the 2 monopolies that the speed is OFTEN less than the 24.4 tops dial up that is available from 2 carriers.

Yes, were I live sucks big time. I made the mistake of thinking coverage would eventually be available, but its not. Around here (southern VA, east TN) a $50 dollar bribe to a cop and you can still get away with murder. It's the old west. I dont see things changing any time soon.

But no, I don't expect anyone to do anything to help poor old me out. But just don't go around thinking I have options available, I don't.

Re:Times change

In my opinion it would be unfeasible to maintain two sites, one for narrow band users and one for high speed users.

It might be extra work, might even be a pita, but 'unfeasible'? Most modern websites of any size separate content from presentation through some sort of content management system.
 
With a decent CMS it should be trivial to offer a 'light' version of your site - I think someone else mentioned the low graphics version of the BBC news site as an example.
 
It is possible that a lot of the content that is increasing page sizes are flash adverts - if I fire up internet explorer there seems to be an ever increasing number of these animated adverts (can folk actually read a web page with three animated adverts amongst the text?). I'd hazard a guess that the reason many sites don't offer light versions of their pages is the threat to revenue through decreased ad views and has very little to do with the complexity of serving up two variants of a website.

Re:While we're at it...

Would it be better if we went back to having a high content/low content index page so the user could pick which one they wanted?

Of course not. People shouldn't be specifiying the width for their columns in absolute terms in the first place. Use relative measures and let the browser decide where everything goes. At least that way your site degrades gracefully if the browser doesn't meet your expectations.

Well written HTML + CSS should be completely device independent. It should be fully navigable on a 1600x1400 monitor, a 320x240 cell phone, or a line by line screen reader. And it should be completely transparent to the user. We have the technology, designers just need to use it.

Re:While we're at it...

No, not really. If you want a 600px header image, then no amount of CSS is going to make that fit nicely on a cell phone. You're going to have to create a different design for the mobile device. I agree that CSS should be used more often, and should be used to give browsers render hints rather than force a behaviour to a specific layout, but it's not a panacea.

Re:

It will of course need a modified design, but it can still all be handled by CSS. Just change the background-image URL, or remove the background altogether and do it with text.

Re:While we're at it...

Or HTML spec is upgraded so that we can specify image size in % as well as pixels similar to a table.

Um, that's in the spec already [w3.org]. Both the "height" and "width" attributes for the IMG tag can be defined as percentages.