Webpages Gaining Bloat (And Sluggishness) At Alarming Rate

Living in an area where power outages are not uncommon, I find myself obliged to revert to dial-up Internet at times, and it seems to get slower than ever, so it’s not surprising to have my subjective impression quantified by a BBC report on a study of the Web’s top 1,000 sites by the HTTP Archive, finding that the average Web page is now about 965 kilobytes in size, up a whopping 33% from the same period in 2010 when the average webpage was a relatively svelte 726 kilobytes.

The article notes that analysis suggests the bloat is attributable to image-heavy layouts, user demand for more interactivity – meaning more Javascript, as well as background tools used to watch what happens when people visit a site, pointing out that big pages generally take longer to load, which can mean visitors get frustrated and go elsewhere if a page takes too long to appear, and that the need for optimization and page-slimming will become more acute as more and more people browse the web via mobile devices, with mobile data networks taking us back to dial-up-esque throughput.

For the full report visit here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16300000