How big is too big?

[TeviH]

I know broadband usage is growing tremendously as it becomes more affordable and available across the world. I also know that this question depends on who the user group of your website is, but generally, for a regular old ecommerce site for general-use products, how big (in terms of initial data loaded) could a website be?

Of course, internal pages may contain photos, video or sound which would increase loading time, but as far as the main page, how big (in kb) is too much? In the past, I've kept my sites down to 70k or less loaded for the home page. I've done as much as 120k for one site.

So how much is too much? 150k? 200k? More?!

 

[LeetPCUser]

Wow that is a good question. I have never truly thought about this. I just made it to the point I thought was fitting.

 

[CrazyTech]

I don't have a set amount, I just try to stay away from images and other large objects as much as possible. Broadband is indeed growing but at the same time you want your website accessible to virtually anyone and there are still dialup users out there.

Just as a general range, I wouldn't flirt with the 150k mark too much. People like fast-loading websites.

 

[yeppers]

Well since most people are on broadband at the moment, and the minimum is 256kbit, which downloads at about 30 KB/sec, I'd say you should stick at around 100KB tops, ofcourse there's a huge amount of faster lines, especially in the US, I'd still stay around that mark for tops, quick loading, and saves bandwidth on your server. Usually my webv designs are 50KB including the images.

Rhett.

 

[JYM]

This is a great question and I am glad you brought it up. A few months ago I did quite some research on this and I found that most visitors only have an attention span of about 8 seconds per webpage, if nothing loads within that amount of time they will move on. So, you will want your content to appear before the 8 seconds are up. Although load times depend on the visitor's speed and your server's speed, generally anything over 40kb is too much for a 56k dialup (which most people still use surprisingly). For broadband users, you could probably make pages over 100kb and not have too much of an affect.

Still, to me the best websites are not those that have incredibly fancy layouts but those that are user-friendly, quick loading, and relatively simple in design. Google is a prime example of this, their frontpage is only 10kb and takes 2 seconds to load with 56k, less than a second with broadband.

Here is a tool you can use to test how fast your website will load. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Hope this is helpful

 

[TeviH]

Wow!! Thanks for that link JYM! That's an invaluable resource!

About that site:

All download times include delays due to round-trip latency with an average of 0.2 seconds per object. With 20 total objects for this page, that computes to a total lag time due to latency of 4 seconds. Note also that this download time calculation does not take into account delays due to XHTML parsing and rendering.

20 objects would mean 20 images/videos/sounds/external files? 20 Doesn't sound like a whole lot - and 4 seconds does! Any opinions about that figure?

Do you think it's fair to say, "I don't want anyone who doesn't have broadband on my site, because it means they probably won't buy from me, anyway"? Is broadband really not availble to money-spending consumers? Wouldn't folks who use dialup be used to waiting 15 ~ 30 seconds for a site to load?