Does page size matter anymore?
I have recently spoken to a few webmasters that say no. I saw one website that was 1.5 MB in size with 66 objects. That is a bit out of the norm. Most often you will see sites that are around 200k which best case will load in 45 seconds. This does not mean they don’t see anything for 45 seconds. Often your text will come up but not your pictures or flash. If you just really need to have a big web page make sure you have useful information in text that comes up quickly. If you design a web page you want people to see the whole thing. If your sites takes 20-60 seconds to load they are not going to wait to see the whole thing. They may just give up and hit the back button and try the next site on the search engine they used. In another article I posted a link to a CNN story that showed 76% of rural users have dial up and 61% of urban/suburban users have dial up. This is a huge group of people to eliminate.
One comment I get is that “I don’t care about dial up users I only want people with money”. The assumption is that dial up users are low income. This is not true. I know poor people with broadband and well off people with dial up. There are still lots of rural areas that don’t have broadband at all. Some people just don’t see the need to spend $50 a month when they don’t use the Internet that much. $50 a month is a lot to pay for a yellow pages. There are lots of people with decent incomes that think about their money before they spend it. Broadband is a luxury not a need. Granted most Americans don’t know the difference between luxury and needs. You would be surprised how many people live in trailer parks and have $80 a month premium cable and $50 a month broadband and a big screen TV but they can’t feed their kids.
I found a website that simulates dial up to test your sites speed. It uses a slow proxy to simulate a slow load. It is not perfect but it is close. I think there are several more I just did a search on Google for “dial up modem simulation”.
A website should be designed to accomplish your goals. If you make the experience rough for your visitor then you lower the chances of accomplishing your goals. I just can’t believe somebody will spend thousands of dollars to build a website and then make is so a large part of the people on the Internet can’t use it.
Additional reading
Web Page load time is more important than you think
Does web page size affect traffic?
i agree that page size on landing pages matter to some extent. i have one client who INSISTS on many huge pictures and it kills me.
i think you are miss reading the statistics in the article though. 39% of all urban people have broadband, you are reading it as 39% of all urban people with home internet access have broadband. theres a large portion of urban people who do not have any internet access at home for various reasons, and 1/5 people in the US never use the web or e-mail! But those with internet in the US, over 50% have broadband.
In the EU it may still be less than 50% of personal ISP subscribers have broadband.
You are right. I think I read another article that talked about internet users and was only talking about internet users. This one does not say. I guess they do mean a % of all people lving in urban or rural. The point of that article was to say more and more people are getting on broadband which is a good thing. I read too much into the article. Everybody seem to have differnt numbers on this. It is really not that diffacult to find out. Just run a report on your log files you can tell in the hosts section which visitors are on broadband and whcih or dail up most the time. I would actually like to know what percentage of AOL users have broad band. On the site that was 1.5 MB and had 66 objects there was 1899 visitors that generated 7891 hits from AOL. That means AOL users only loaded 4 objects on average on a 66 object page.
For users… load time is important.
I’m always concerned with the google spider timing out with a page load.
If the spiders don’t like the page, the user’s not going to see the page.