Web Page Loading Times

[pageoneresults]

What are people thinking? What am I missing? Shouldn't I be worried about serving up the most optimized page I can from a load time standpoint? Or are we at the point in time where download speeds are no longer a concern? I'm thinking the latter based on some of the latest research I'm doing. For example, one site in the SEO industry weighs in with these numbers for the home page...

Objects Qty Size* %
HTML 1 70,508 2.8%
CSS 1 313,753 12.4%
Scripts 3 316,227 12.5%
XML 0 0 0.0%
Images 71 216,815 8.6%
CSS Images 254 1,469,172 0
Multimedia 0 0 0.0%
Other 2 141,052 5.6%
Total 332 2,527,527 100%

2,527,527 is the total size of the page. Based on average download speeds, the above translates into these types of download times...

Speed Seconds
56K 350.99
128K ISDN 157.29
640K DSL/Cable 37.49
1.5 Mbps 19.5
3 Mbps 13.22
6 Mbps 9.93

I'm finding more and more blogs doing this too. I have a high speed business connection (1/6) and when I visit a site and my status bar is still processing, there may be some challenges. It appears that this whole image farm thing is one of the major contributors to fat web pages too. Those Flickr farm images usually weigh in at well over 100k each and people are quick to drop 10, 15 or 20 of those things on a page.

Next in line for bloat are CSS images. This particular site has 1.4MB in CSS images alone. It's one of those Web 2.0 templates that shoves as much as possible in the available viewport. I guess the trend today is to put most of the design into the CSS files. No more images on page, everything is set as a background image which I fully understand and do myself. But, 1.4MB worth?

Next are links. This site has 332 links total for this one page. Many are duplicates due to the template layout. Everything has its own little container and I do mean everything. Someone went overboard with the micromanagement of elements with this one.

So, how fat are your pages right now? How much junk in your trunk? Does it even matter?

[simonuk]

2.5Mb? Ye gads!

I'm still trying to keep everything under 100k for mobile users and the large number of people who, like me, use a dongle with a set cap each month.

[rocknbil]

A site that is very visual, and really needs a lot of graphics:

345512 (call it a fat 350 K. :-( )

A less graphic intensive site, but still relies on graphics:

146267

Both of these sites drop to under 70K with text-only content pages.

I think it's somewhere in the middle, the 40K home page is no longer a target, but you have to find a middle ground between what visitors want (don't make me read, SHOW ME) and what we need to do (download speed.)

I guess the trend today is to put most of the design into the CSS files. No more images on page, everything is set as a background image ....

An image is an image, so it's the same weight no matter what. As you know (for those that don't) we do this to separate the content from the markup . . . not to change page size . . . A compelling related question is posed here [webmasterworld.com] . . . .