With today’s high Internet connection rates webmasters don’t think they should bother much about their web page size and load time. Still this parameter remains essential both for SEO and usability:
- According to eMarketer research 16% of people leave the page if it loads longer than 10 seconds and only every second person will wait more than 15 seconds (so you can lose half of your visitors by overlooking your page load time);
- The general rule of thumb is to keep your page size up to 150K as pages greater than that are not fully cached by search engines (let’s put it like this: the longer a search crawler waits, the less it likes visiting your page).
Web Page Speed Report provides exhaustive information on a page size including:
- total page size;
- total size of the images (and HTML and CSS images separately);
- JavaScript size;
- CSS size;
- Each page object size;
- And download times for a set of connection rates:
What’s more, the tool will also provide you with the list of useful recommendations on reducing size of particular elements:
Page Size Extractor offers a short but very handy analysis :
- Total page size;
- Text to HTML ratio;
- Total hyperlinks number;
- Total images number;
- Total size of all images;
- Each image size;
- The full list of all links on the page.
Web Developer FireFox Extension is another handy utility that can show each image size right within a page:
If after checking these tools you would want to figure how to reduce your page size, you might find this post by Marketing Experiments very useful. It goes back to 2005 but remains topical till today. It lists most effective ways to reduce your page weight:
- Get rid of all inessential page elements;
- Clean up your CSS;
- Get rid of frames;
- Compress your images;
- Clean up your HTML, etc
The most common cause for slow-loading pages today is complexity of page design. That is, the pages LOAD quickly but they take too long to render.
You can blame Web 2.0 for that effect. Too much unnecessary AJAX, too many unnecessary image files used in rendering the page, too many DIV placements, etc.
What a great tool to use for ourselves as well as clients. What seems to be the smallest thing can truly make the biggest difference!
Hi Ann
Looks like a great tool – thank you.
I’ve been using this tool for a long time and found it to be very useful. I especially like using it on my competition. I have a glass jewelry and art glass site and you would be amazed how many of my competitors still use uncompressed images. Imagine downloading a bunch of 100KB+. Basic stuff, but goes a long way to providing an enjoyable customer experience.
The file sizes reported seem to be inaccurate for gzip compressed content.
I have a javascript file that’s being reported as 52k and it notes at the bottom:
“Congratulations. This site is using HTTP compression, otherwise called content encoding using gzip. The sizes reported here are for compressed content sent from the server to the client.”
However, 52k is the uncompressed size. Compressed, it’s around 15k, and I just verified it is being served compressed (at least to Firefox).
@MendyO, what do you mean by uncompressed images? Almost all image formats have built-in compression. Or you mean unoptimized?
Use Xenu!
I use this tool to get the overall size of my web pages.
Ann Smarty – do you recommend this tool?
Pratheep
@Pratheep : Xenu is a good tool… I do use it too. The ones I described above are available online and seem easier to use and faster though…
Web Developer Toolbar
Information >>> View Document Size
As well as what Michael says, source of content is also very important because of the way browsers thread content. Hosting images in a bucket on Amazon for instance, maybe just navigational elements reduces the number of files that need to be downloaded from your own domain.
It is actually quite funny that this image is so large
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/websiteoptimization2.jpg
Really Nice Tools, Thanks
Great article covered almost all the points !!
BTW: Ann u look cute ;)
Great article I love flipping sites over to CSS to minimize their load time. One of the worst offenders for website bloat I find are people using Ajax frameworks instead of writing their own that only have the features they need.
MLA,
Sorry for the late reply …
I mean many people (artists) do not know about or understand compression and will literally use the raw image from the camera which could easily be a 1MB file.
For my art glass and glass jewelry website, I make sure the images and graphics have all been compressed to the maximum level possible without degrading the image. My download time could be better but it’s much better than most of my fellow glass artists.
It’s a nice tool.. Thank you
Thanks for the great tool.
Umm, I checked and this page is 517k, seems almost 3x the recommended limit. I checked using this site, http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Thanks for such a nice information.
I also used this tool.
very good tools …!
http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso
look at this must be the biggest page on the net .Great tool was using another but this is a lot better
Great post. I have began using these tools. Thanks Ann.
Great tool my main problem area is image size. Google now use page speed in its ranking system, I am using a 20MB Broadband at home along with my local caching my site seems perfectly ok and quick to load this is probably not the case for many users. Time for the site to go on a Diet.
Great tool my main problem area is image size. Google now use page speed in its ranking system, I am using a 20MB Broadband at home along with my local caching my site seems perfectly ok and quick to load this is probably not the case for many users. Time for the site to go on a Diet.