It wasn’t long ago that web developers obsessed about page weight (the total file size of a web page’s HTML, images, scripts, CSS, etc..). The “lighter” a page, the faster it would download, and presumably offer the user a more enjoyable browsing experience.
With everyone on lighting-fast Internet connections, optimizing page weight has fallen by the wayside. When I was developing content heavy sites forpublishers in 1999 we would typically keep pages at 50k or less. At that size even modems users would find the site usable.
Today I did a quick survey to find that many popular sites are over 300k (3x the size recommended by HCI).
www.cnn.com: 631k
www.abcnews.com: 331k
www.cnet.com: 533k
This, of course, is no problem for users on dual-core machines connected to DSL. But many people now surf the web from mobile devices, with much slower processors and Internet connections. With the popularity of thesedevices, it’s almost as if we have been hurled back in time to the days of modems.
The solution may be to re-visit these optimization techniques from days of old, or to operative twin sites, one being specific to mobile devices. Whatever the answer may be, I beg you, as a mobile surfer, please put your sites on a diet.
Topics:
