Have you ever felt that your web page is getting bloated?

With the development of infrastructure, our Internet speed is getting faster and faster, so do you feel that the loading speed of web pages has become faster? Have you ever thought that web pages are getting bloated? According to the HTTP Archive report, after investigating about 500,000 web pages, they found that the average size of each web page was slightly less than 2Mb, reaching 1953Kb, an increase of 15% from last year.

Of course, the websites investigated do not include complex web applications over there. Last year, the increase was 32%. Although the rate has narrowed this year, it is still not optimistic.

　Be careful with multiple pictures

　 By segmenting the content of the web page, we can also understand the impact of each part on changes in web page capacity.

As can be seen from the above table:

HTML content has increased by 2Kb, which is not a big number, but it can increase the content a lot. The professed trends of reduction and refinement are deceptive.

CSS has increased by 11Kb. Responsive web design and CSS3 should have contributed a lot to this increase, but JavaScript has not decreased. Although there are many CSS management and reduction tools, each website requests an average of 6 CSS files.

27% of the websites in the survey still use Flash, mainly used in advertising, videos and games. This is a 5% decrease from last year, which is not as much as we imagined.

Another biggest contributor is pictures, which account for 85% of the entire web page capacity! Although the resolution of images is getting higher and higher, Retina screen devices only account for a small part, and there are many tools that can help reduce image usage. In addition, some web pages have more than 50 pictures, isn't this too overwhelming!

　Not a good thing

　 Compared with last year’s 32% and the 30% the year before, the 15% growth does not seem to be much, but another question is, has the average bandwidth increased so fast? And with the development of mobile Internet, one-third of users now use mobile devices to access web pages. What about traffic charges?

For website owners, increasingly bloated web pages are not a good thing:

The user experience becomes worse. No matter how good the content of the website is, it is wrong to load slowly and make people wait!

By making the web page reach 2Mb, do you want to ignore one-third of mobile users?

Google will lower the website rating and make it harder to search. (Of course Google has never said the specific operation process)

The more code there is, the greater the possibility of crashing.

With such a large traffic volume, does it really cost nothing?

　The reason? lazy!

　As for the reason? Some people speculate that CMS templates and frameworks are overused. They allow developers to develop faster and cheaper, but at the expense of quality and efficiency. The tool contains many functions that are not used at all, but removing them is a tedious task.

In addition, there are also reasons such as developers’ tight budgets and limited development time. However, some people sum it up in one word: lazy.

But at least, it has nothing to do with the web browser.