Text to HTML Ratio

What's a good ratio?

[MatthewHSE]

I was just wondering what is considered a "good" text to HTML ratio? My homepage is currently at 27.34%, which is up from what it has been, but it seems to me I could still do better.

Incidentally, here are the full results of my homepage results with the Webpage Size Checker [searchengineworld.com]. Is there anything that could be better?

Thanks,

Matthew

Total WebPage Size 13379 (bytes)
Visible Text Size 3592 (bytes)
Size of HTML Tags 9787 (bytes)
Text to HTML Ratio 27.34%
Number of Images 11
Largest Image Size 14862 (bytes)
Size of All Images 51166 (bytes)

[troels nybo nielsen]

Do you really need all that HTML and all those images? Not that the ratio is disastrous, but it is certainly good to have small file sizes.

I just checked the front page for one of my websites. The ratio is only slightly better than yours (about 32%), but the page is much smaller. Even if I include the CSS file the size is less than 10k.

It might be good if you could move at least some of those images to subpages. Most likely it will also be an advantage to reduce your HTML. Try to get as close to 50% as possible. (I think ill do that myself by removing some not strictly necessary HTML and writing a bit more text.)

[toast]

Use this simulator [exe.adam.ne.jp] to browse what kind of ad will be supplied to your (or others) web site.
Then optimize your contents to preferable ads.

[MatthewHSE]

Hi guys, thanks for the replies. Actually, the numbers returned by the Size Checker aren't quite what most of my users get, due to HTTP compression. My entire homepage, not counting graphics, gets compressed down to about 3kb. Throw in my CSS and it comes in at about 5kb. So I'm not too worried about having nearly 10kb of HTML since it still downloads (for most users) in about two or three seconds. The images aren't what you'd call "necessary," but they certainly add to the appeal of the page, and since readable content comes in first and I've specified width and heights for my images, I think I'll leave them for now.

That's a good point about trying to write more text; I think I'll spend some time on that and see what I can do. My current blocks of text are quite small; really just basic summaries of one thing or another with links to further information. So it should be fairly easy to add more real content.

Thanks, Toast, for that simulator link. I haven't had time to check it out yet, but I'll see about giving it a try soon.