Forum Moderators: mack
1. how do you find out the kb of a webpage as someone told me that my front (default) page is about 160kb lol.
2. I told my web designer that my front page is toooo big and that from the BRETTS STEPS TO A SUCCESSFUL SITE states that each page should be about 10kb ,, in response to this my web designer said "if you want 10kb we will remove EVERYTHING from your first page and have one little itty bitty picture and some text." so what is the right thing to do? dont most sites have lots of options on their front page too?
10k is a hard, but not impossible number to reach.
I just ran some index pages through that tool (hadn't used it in quite some time) and got the following:
Total WebPage Size 5647 (bytes)
Visible Text Size 2473 (bytes)
Size of HTML Tags 3174 (bytes)
Text to HTML Ratio 44.28%
Number of Images 4
Largest Image Size 6555 (bytes)
Size of All Images 22765 (bytes)
Grand Total:
Images+Html= 28412 (bytes)
Total WebPage Size 4016 (bytes)
Visible Text Size 1805 (bytes)
Size of HTML Tags 2211 (bytes)
Text to HTML Ratio 45.43%
Number of Images 2
Largest Image Size 7312 (bytes)
Size of All Images 12153 (bytes)
Grand Total:
Images+Html= 16169 (bytes)
Total WebPage Size 4449 (bytes)
Visible Text Size 2534 (bytes)
Size of HTML Tags 1915 (bytes)
Text to HTML Ratio 57.44%
Number of Images 4
Largest Image Size 4841 (bytes)
Size of All Images 14256 (bytes)
Grand Total:
Images+Html= 18705 (bytes)
Total WebPage Size 2481 (bytes)
Visible Text Size 1180 (bytes)
Size of HTML Tags 1301 (bytes)
Text to HTML Ratio 48.04%
Number of Images 2
Largest Image Size 1244 (bytes)
Size of All Images 2484 (bytes)
Grand Total:
Images+Html= 4965 (bytes)
That last one shows it can be done :)
WBF
<edit>A couple of those other ones, especially the first, show how time can lead to bloat:(</edit>
Just enter the url of the page you want to test in the form.
If you use Firefox with the Webmaster Toolbar, it has an option in the "tools" menu that will take you directly to the results page of running the above on the page you are currently on. Webmaster Toolbar is has some other very nice features as well.
The 10kb limit is a guideline, not an absolute. If you have a good reason to break it go ahead.
You can mitigate the impact on the user experience by trying to design pages that can be rendered as they load, so visitors see something useful quickly. The front page of one of my sites is 32kb, but the HTML is 8kb and the CSS another 7kb. Visitors see a quite adequately rendered page after the first 13 kb are loaded, the rest is images and javascripts that load later.
If you sticky mail me the url of the 160kb page, I would be interested in seeing it, and might make some comments.
Added: 160 KB total isn't enormous, even on a slow dial-up connection. Maybe a minute to load. As long as you make sure that the text loads quickly (so there is something to read right at the start), people will put up with having the images take a minute to come in.
I unfortunately have picked a bad website business to be seo friendly (sell art) but that is smart to have the text load quickly.
However I dont think anyone will wait a minute for my pages unless I'm giving away free money!
Anyone wanting to see a larger, more detailed image of a certain piece will be willing to wait for it to download.
If using Flash for a slide show type effect the intial images can be shown quickly as the others download in the background. If using JS the same effect can be accomplished.
Either way, the site visitor will have the illusion of a fast loading page, even though it may have a very large size due to images.
I would focus on getting the markup down to a reasonable level first (to better feed the SE bots), and then look at how best to get the images to download in a way that preserves the users' experience.
WBF
