Forum Moderators: open
I've a content-rich non-commercial site of about 1000 pages 'weighing' from 20-40kb each. Though we have many over 100kb and some over 200kb. They were written to cover a topic each, without regard to page size, and it would be an easy matter to subdivide the pages into several smaller ones: but what size is best?
I'm not a fan of Alexa, it's far too aggressive in many respects, but I did check it recently and was surprised to see it classifies our domain as 'slow loading'. So we'd like to fix this.
It's flat file, no ads, no Adsense, few images, table structured, lots of original text.
We use a quality virtual host; The slowness is due to two factors:
1) Each page uses an external 3kb style sheet file
2) The file size of each page
3) Not sure if this affects load time: Our root .htacces file is 6kb of mod alias page redirects and IP deny from
Bearing in mind the number of factors to balance in designing a page to be both attractive to visitors and the SEs; what rough guide do you use in regard to page file size?
A page I read at SEworld recommended a miniscule 4Kb!
Ta!
More details you find on
[webmasterworld.com...]
That's a good idea (if every page is using the same external stylesheet) because the browser will cache it so it only gets downloaded once.
>> 2) The file size of each page
View your site on a dialup. Think 5.6K = 1 sec download time for a 56K modem. So a 100K page will take 18 seconds. That's a looong time.
Other thing you can do for userfriendliness is improve the perceived download time. For example it might be necessary to have a large images on a page, but if the rest of the page loads first then the user could read other parts of the page while waiting. You don't want 18 seconds of nothing then suddenly the pages appears.
Also make use of caching. Reuse the same images as much as possible across the site. Externalize CSS and javascript. For example a logo GIF. On the first page visited the user will need to download the logo image, but since it gets cached it won't downloaded again on subsequent pages. You can get every other page on the site to pretty much snap right up this way.
My rule of thumb has been to keep it under 30K. With good use of caching the differences between pages would be under 10K. So on a dialup that's 6 seconds on the first page, and less than two seconds on each additional page. Truth be told I've been known to go up to 60K. For a redesign I'm about to do I'm shooting for 10-15K tops.
