Why heavy web pages cost you business

May 2008

Web pages are measured in size terms in kilobytes (kb) and best practice for websites suggests for home pages or common landing pages that the combined 'weight' of graphics and html is less that 70kb. This article shows you how to:

• Test your own website against these criteria
• Find out how excessive page size could be costing you business
• Correct pages that are too heavy and slow to download

As broadband becomes more available then some argue that this is rather severe and a limit of 100kb is more practical. But here in Ireland the poor quality of our broadband is second only to Greece and Mexico, and accidents of geography condemn many still to dial up connections. Whats more, in common with Internet users around the globe, our attention span is getting lower. Pages need to be functional within 3 seconds.

Frequently web designers overlook the importance of page size and their clients pay the penalty.

Check your web page sizes

Use this online tool to check your page sizes individually. Then compare your results to the recommended sizes above. Or check what the experts say.

Be sure to scroll down and look at the 'page objects' table to see how big the components of the page you are checking are.

How large pages cost you business

Put simply:

• Heavy pages will not work at all on dial up and dodgy broadband
• Your visitor will get fed up waiting for the page to download and go elsewhere
• Your AdWord ranking will suffer
• Your organic search ranking will probably suffer too

How to put things right

Take another look at that 'page objects' table in the page results to see which elements of your page are taking valuable time to download. Consider discussing with your web developer the recommendations below this

• Avoid using graphic text - it will not be read by search engines and makes pages heavy. Sacrifice stylising of text (which requires graphics) and stick to designing around easy to read web compatible font like Verdana and Arial.
• If you must use Flash (and read here why we say no) then make sure it is correctly compressed. Recently we have found websites cheerfully running Flash movies on their pages in excess of half a megabyte (500kb)
• Make sure all graphics are properly compressed 72 dpi or lower is ideal.
• Consider reducing the number of graphics to those that add to the communication of the page only - the web is a text based information medium and users are increasingly goal orientated - do not put graphics between visitors and their goal!

Still worried? Talk to our site rescue team and see if we can help!