Forum Moderators: open
It's a rare page that comes in under 100kb these days. Throw in slow server calls to back office databases, 3rd party ad servers and other little frills and curlicues - and a dial-up user can wait 45 seconds to a minute for a page to read.
One of the reasons I don't do more news reading online these days is because of this nonsense.
Ah well, it just makes fast pages stand out more from the crowd.
Funny thing is, with css, better image compression algos in Photoshop and other technology progress, it's easier than ever to hit that 40kb sweet spot.
If the amount of kilobytes in your site can be cut down, great. If you have not got anything to do on your site, look at byte sizes too
using includes, these includes rarely go over a kilobyte, and may contain a navigation bar thats on X amount of pages. If you delete all the indentations, use CSS etc you are saving a whack of bandwidth
"compacting and repairing" your databases is also great (but off topic)
I think Ive halved the overall kilobyte total of my site purely from optimising and picking information up at WMW
Looking at the source code of this page, Brett does something along the lines of what I do. All the indentations that you put in your HTML take up a byte for every space, and its wasted space
I managed to take 10%+ off my .htm file sizes by removing these spaces.
I have mentioned this in a chat room in web design, and people went crazy saying its bad design, because anyone else editing the code wouldnt have a clue where to start, but if you make your site on your own, its a winner ;)
Did someone ever mention in here that there is an optimum page size for google ?(not trying to turn this into a google thread)
Looking at the source code of this page, Brett does something along the lines of what I do. All the indentations that you put in your HTML take up a byte for every space, and its wasted space.
I've been desigining this way for years. I've received numerous comments from clients about how clean the code looks. The comments I receive from developers are somewhat different!
I've taken the no space, no indent theory one step further. I make sure that there are no broken or wrapping tags. Most of you know that I use FP. I have options for setting up my html coding preferences. I've opted to have no spaces and no indents in my html. I have my left indent set at "0" and my right margin set at "2000" characters. This insures that I get no tag breaks.
It has also reduced the size of my web sites considerably. It is only a k here and there, but if you are working with WYSIWYG, thats a lot of k to reduce! I look at my code these days and I see maybe 20-25 lines including the <head>. Now that is what I call lean and mean. I probably have < 10% <body> fat!
the search/replace on FP is great for editing the code. You can put 5 spaces (or whatever) into your search, and replace these spaces with no space
FP does it all for you, great if you use it
Im also hoping to move all my pages into a database so that the minimum amount of code is needed and the rest is content
I wont be needing FP for much longer
edited/ just removing the smilies to save loading time <smile>
Do any HTML editors allow both "beautify" and "un-beautify"? Everytime any team member downloads a page, they could first beautify - then code their little fingers off - and finally un-beautify before placing the page back live on the server.
If you are working with external CSS, there won't be that much code there anyway!
It only shows one the text. It handles frames by listing them for one to navigate manually.
One can have both Lynx and a 'regular' browser open, and use Lynx to speed-surf to a page, then use the other browser to render the page fully.
This is probably obvious to all of us, but perhaps not to our clients.
"Forcing users to browse PDF files makes usability approximately 300% worse compared to HTML pages. Only use PDF for documents that users are likely to print." Jakob Nielson [useit.com]
I hate reading PDF webpages. It gives me a headache.
Total WebPage Size 32803 (bytes)
Visible Text Size 7189 (bytes)
Size of HTML Tags 25614 (bytes)
Text to HTML Ratio 22.41%
Number of Images 61
Largest Image Size 44348 (bytes)
Size of All Images 265489 (bytes)
Grand Total:
Images+Html= 298292 (bytes)
Download time:
14.4k 174.44 seconds
28.8k 95.22 seconds
56k 56.31 seconds
ISDN (128k) 33.82 seconds
T1 (1.44 MB) 17.58 seconds
Loading images from 7 other servers in addition to what's on the site (one's animated). What can a person say? I'm stunned.What do you tell the web designer, much less the site owner?
I believe the biggest cause of this sort of nonsense is the browser cache. What happens is this: The client has all his site stored in his cache by the browser(after the initial load). He admires his site regularly and thus keeps it current in the cache, and he never actually has to wait for it to download thru his modem in all its awful slowness.
I have had low-tech users flatly refuse to believe that their page is slow because they say, "it loads pretty fast on my computer, maybe you need an upgrade yourself?".
I have found it difficult to persist in the face of obvious disbelief - maybe they think we are only looking for business to rebuild it for them.
Testing load times without first clearing the cache is pointless.
Oops - That's what I get for using a 1280x1024 screen without adjusting the font size, and it wouldn't hurt to actually wear those glasses.
Since then, I've noticed connection speeds greatly increasing for the average user, with very few dial-ups using anything less than a 56k modem. Of course their actual connection speed varies, but with proxy servers using cached pages, all and all the general performance has vastly improved. I have slowly crept up to under 50k for the index and under 40 for the support pages.
Marcia, when I run into that nonsense, I get pretty fierce. Usually a little visual aid, via dumped cache and a dial-up connection gets some mighty red faces and a bit more cooperation.
A designer with some pretty big credentials once created a site template that weighed in at 150kb before any content was added. All graphic navigation and three nested frames!
In that case I had clients who were doing a lot of bowing and scraping to the "big guy", so I had to work a bit more subtly than usual. But I persisted and things did change! I feel I owe it to those who hire me to shoot very straight, even if I sometimes need to muffle the sound.
My site's index.html simply branches to the proper main page for the URI with which the site was invoked.
That main page loads several pages into several frames. Those pages are preprocessed through PHP, and link to some Javascript files (they would also link to a CSS file, but NN 4.08 crashes if I do this, so I had to use server-side inclusion).
Although my site is very fast-loading, and all the files I have mentioned are small, the point I am making is that an accurate determination of download speed requires actually running an instrumented browser. The total download size for a page may include far more than just the one html file and several graphics files.
As for the topic of this thread: I share your yearning for small page footprint. I wish also for clean, uncluttered graphics design.
Web page bloat reminds me of how slow Windows startup is. I am a professional programmer and I can assure you that if it were a priority they could have designed startup to take just a few seconds (reading in a saved image from contiguous disk sectors and speeding up the PNP device detection).
Please excuse me for the last paragraph, which is off-topic. My pen slipped.
As for images, somebody mentioned images of more than 50Kb. I have a travel site with a photo on nearly every page, and photos obviously add a lot of value to a travel site. Still, for the last several years I've been limiting most of my photos to a width of 275 pixels (325 pixels on photo-gallery pages), which--with compression--yields JPEG files that can be as small as 5Kb, are usually 8-12Kb, and don't exceeed 20-21Kb even in the larger photo-gallery sizes.
I also use text links instead of graphic ads (I can do this because I generate revenue with affiliate links). As a result, I have pages that work well even for readers with older dial-up modems.
The reason for most 50kb images is ignorance. There are some really good jpg compression algos available these days, as you mention, e_f_v. Adobe's ImageReady, for instance, (it's integrated into Photoshop) blows me aways with what it can do.
On another note. With the myriad of technologies available for delivering content I wonder if there will ever be a way to set a standard for what is optimal: EG: 2 content delivery servers on a TCP/IP lan equal 1 content delivery server over HTTP.
From my perspective there is simply no way I can possible keep track of all the bits and pieces that affect the DL times of my pages. There are simply too many variables even with a tool to check page weight. Think of server loads for example. Today it may be snappy quick but tomorrow it's deathly slow.
So I advocate for and stick to the basics and shoot from the hip when I have to. Keep the images small, no more than a few on any page unless the user know's to expect a delay and chose it anyway. Optimize your code for HTML DOM compliance. Use text when possible instead of fancy image maps and image roll-overs, etc...
Granted I don't work on web sites that are on the level of a Dell Company or Merrill-Lynch (sp?) with their huge backend infrastructure but shouldn't the same rules apply for them as well? I have a cable modem now but used to have a 56Kbps modem and remember what it was like visiting Dell's web site. Good lord! I had time to run to the loo and still have to wait upon my return.
Which makes me wonder, what is it that they see/think that allows them to ignore the basics? Why skip what is common knowledge for keeping a visitor that might otherwise leave if they wait too long. I can't believe they don't care.
Lastly, page downloads are only part of the problem. If anyone here uses MSIE I'm sure you're aware of the havoc it wreaks when it's first started up. In MS' inifinite wisdom that first start up forces a check for upgrades and who knows whatelse by default. The more savvy user knows how to turn this off but the majority of users out there just accept the default settings which adds additional time before they see that first page. Which is a nightmare if your web site happens to be their home-page!
All in all, that 40KB sweet spot is quickly becoming extinct on the web and I'm all for it. Makes my web sites look rather good by comparison.
then once you have them hooked on being the fastest site in the West just mention it any time anyone wants to add anything extraneous
also never try to do too many things on a single page...if the site is lightning fast there is no need to, loading a different page is no hassle
I have my home page set to google since before i was popular since its page size to enter is so small and fast (my cable modem clocks at 1.2 to 1.5 Meg via 2wire.com). On the same note I have noticed many of my small pages <10,000 tend to get more bookmarks and links.
If it is worth your time to create content for high bandwidth users great. But don't forget about everybody else (i wont ;) )
Question: Where can I measure a first page weight? Have tried Brett's, but it doesn't report any images and reports that this site is speedy. It isn't. Opera reports 140kb. The site has frames and many images both in the left navigation frame and several more in the long content frame. Does speedcheckers use real time or just a math? Because Usability gov reports that "Actual connection speeds are about 38% lower than modem speed capability".
Want to convince the people in charge to reduce the weight. Originally Opera reported 1MB+ for the first page and they aim for entrepeneurs! But I've actually had some success and this Monday it's down to 140kb according to Opera. That's still much too heavey, so I want to persist.(But I am pretty pleased all the same.)
Off topic: Also trying to get them off frames so members can link to their content. There is a lot of useful stuff.
Inga
So we went to the burgerking.com site to find out more. We live in a rural area and have an internet connection only slightly better than tin cans and string.
We waited, and waited, and waited as the BK site tried to download a 638k flash animation! Of what? Dancing hamburgers? Smiling customers?
No clue. We left the site.
Why do they think customers are interested in watching a Burger King movie anyway? I went to get info that would easily be delivered in an attractive text format - but it wasn't available.
So we laughed, then went upstairs to cook our own veggie burgers.
I used it as an example of "what's bad about flash" when I had a client ask if we could do his site ALL in flash. Horrified, he quickly recanted.
Does anyone know about it and is it OK to use. I mean you OK some cookies. Do they spy or someting?
Countrycat
Ah, so they do have some use those terrible bloated pages. Good for you :)
