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April 25, 2003
Page weight: myth or menace?
Oy, I really hate to pick fights with Gerry McGovern...as someone with tech writing inclinations, how can't you like a guy who's putting the focus on content? But his column, Fast-downloading websites are still important, has struck a false chord with me. Gerry writes: So, what size should your webpage be? King and others believe that if you want to guarantee your pages download in less than 10 seconds, you should set a limit of 30 KB. My experience is that a 50 KB limit is reasonable. Aim for 30 KB but don't go over 50 KB if possible. Now here's my petty, picayune, pedantic self. The page that says you shouldn't go over 50K (if possible) weighs 57K. Oops! Then again, his home page only weighs 43K and looks pretty decent. Here are some other page weights (as computed by BBEdit after a save complete from Mozilla):
Is it just me? Or is it very hard to buy this under 50K limit when so many mainstream sites exceed it by a lot? Here's my theory. First, even Jakob Nielsen (Mr. Tiny Page) notes that: It matters less if it takes longer to load the full page and all its illustrations if the user can start acting on some information fast. In other words, as long as HEIGHT and WIDTH tags are provided, HTML pages will render quickly and many people (apparently) will quite happily navigate before all the graphics are loaded. It sounds like Jared Spool and the folks at UIE have figured out the same thing. They write: Testing shows no correlation between page download time and users giving up. All this said, it isn't the greatest of design strategies to provide the majority of your users skeleton pages (text with holes where graphics should be) if you're trying to maximize user experience for all users. Reducing page size still seems to be a worthy goal, and usually means moving to CSS and optimizing graphics. But...as I like to say, all generalizations are false. You want to do a page that weighs more than 50K? Go right ahead! You're in pretty good company. Just don't skip the tags that'll make the pages render fast even without the graphics.
Comments
Most of us techies have lost touch with those who don't no better - there are masses of people who simply live with the frustration, but don't know any better. Page weight alone isn't a consideration. Page weight in consideration of the task that most users will be conducting, and the kind of bandwidth your users have - it is a consideration. -- Posted by micah on April 28, 2003 02:08 PMPerhaps the better thing to measure is the text percentage of the pageweight. This implies that text has greater "meaning" or "usefulness" on a page, which, in most cases, I'd have to say is true. So, a "heavy" page like the WSJ or Times or CNN that consists mostly of text may not be such a bad thing, as opposed of a page of the same weight that consists mostly of two images. Hmmm? -- Posted by on April 28, 2003 02:41 PM
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IDblog is Beth Mazur tilting at power law windmills. A little bit Internet, a little bit technology, a little bit society, and a lot about designing useful information products. Send your cards and letters to .
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