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New Year Resolution: Lose website weight

The website monitoring company, Pingdom, has carried out research that suggests web pages have increased in size, on average, by 25% in the last 12 months.

The research analysed the top 1000 websites, from the HTTP Archive, and found on average the page size has increased from 626kB to 784KB. 

All content types have risen in the past year and images, as always, make up the bulk of a web page but Javascript usage has exploded. Pingdom speculates (more of an educated guess) the rise in javascript has been accelerated by the rise of HTML5, the demand to offer a more dynamic web experience and heavily optimised Javascript engines in web browsers.

Larger file sizes meaning longer loading times. Google, Amazon, Yahoo and others have done extensive research on webpage speeds and they are quite conclusive - page speed matters!

Some Fun and Scary Statistics

• 75% of visitors will not return to a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load (Akamai 2006)
• Akamai revisited the study in 2009 and found 47% expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
• Every 100ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007).
• Google discovered that a change from loading a 10-result page in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20% (Linden 2006)
• Yahoo found that a 400ms slower page would see 5-9% more people leave before the page finished loading
• Google Search found that a 400 millisecond delay resulted in a -0.59% change in searches/user. After the delay was removed, these users still had -0.21% fewer searches, indicating that a slower user experience affects long term behaviour.