The average size of the most popular web sites is rapidly approaching 1MB per page. That’s huge. No wonder it takes so long to load some pages.
The problem is compounded when you consider the popularity of mobile devices. Loading up a 1MB web page on your cell phone, for example, could be 0.5% of your monthly data allowance. Visit that site a few times per day, every day a month, and you can see how web page bloat would become an issue.
Note how the number of page requests is barely increasing. Meaning that all this extra money they’re spending on hosting all this information, programmers to write the code for the sites, and the cost of the space on the servers doesn’t seem to be driving in any new traffic (at least for HTML). And I would argue that the increase in page requests has been due to the increased sales in tablets and smartphones, not because of the fancier websites.
Comment by gamerguy473 — December 22, 2011 @ 2:28 pm
I try to keep Wambooli clean, but the Google Ads do slow some of the things down. Sometimes the slowness here is due to the MySQL server. And the XML data pulled from the government’s weather site for the Wambooli PorchCam can be dreadfully slow. But as far as file sizes go, I can’t fathom 1MB of data per page.
And for the mobile devices, it’s possible to redirect traffic to a lower-bandwidth page on the site. I do that here on Wambooli. I know that Wikipedia does it, as do several of the blog sites I frequent.
Comment by admin — December 22, 2011 @ 4:16 pm