Web standards - Page size

I would like to know if there are any web standards regarding web page file-size , how much should the total assets on the page weight considering the users have an averag开发者_StackOverflow社区e internet connection.

Thanks

Depends entirely on your users platform.

Mobile

These are estimates, surprisingly difficult to find good comparison charts.

• Normal phone networks, anywhere from 5-20kbps
• Edge is pretty slow at around 40kbps as far as I can tell
• 3G will download max at around 80kbps
• 4g will be incredibly fast and is the future, but not out yet

It is important though to realise that mobile users have a higher tolerance for slow loads. So a 3 second wait for a mobile page shouldn't put many people off.

Broadband

Depending on your visitors location, can have varying speeds.

http://www.speedtest.net/global.php#0

Africa has average of 1.93mbps, South America 3mbps and the rest of the world is > 6mbps. These (as far as I can tell are averages).

So if your visitor base is biased towards the Africas or South America, you should try to aim for a lighter page design. The rest of the world it becomes less of an issue.

As broadband speeds improve world wide, page sizes will become largely irrelevant. But that day is not here yet!

The Importance of Speed

I studied a bit on online responsiveness, and can't find resources at the moment to back this up, but Google as far as I know did some research and found users were sensitive to page delays of just 30ms, meaning they would have a favourable bias towards two equal content pages where one loaded >=30ms faster. So speed can help get a leg up on competition! And the human brain is a lot more sensitive to speed than we might assume. Remember though, different platform users have different tolerance levels.

Recommendation

The faster the better! A well designed, CSS driven layout will naturally be small and have a lot of other benefits down the line (SEO). If your page is loading slowly, find the bottleneck (server or filesizes) and aim to reduce so that the page load is natural and speedy on your audiences target platforms.

There are no real standards, seeing as connection speeds vary massively across the planet and even from user to user.

For general pointers on keeping sizes down, see Google's Pagespeed rules: Minimize payload size

Don't forget about latency too. If you have to have a lot of data on a page, it's much better to have it be in 1 or 2 large items (i.e. 1 css sprite image instead of 20 small items). For every item, you are going to incur at least 1 round trip latency delay.

Even if you page is "small", by whatever standard you use, if it has a large number of items on it, it's going to load slowly for remote users. This is one of the main benefits of CDNs - moving content closer to users so latency is lower.

There is no standard that limits the size of a web page to a fixed size, so I can't quote you a source that says "a web page must be no greater than 100kb" as no such source exists.

The size of the page is entirely related to the audience visiting the web page. If you have an "average" audience, you could confidently send 200kb (inclusive of all images, includes and HTML). If you are targeting mobile devices, you will want to make you pages much smaller than this. If you are publishing data for consumption by online services, it may be acceptable to send mega-byte pages.

So this is where as a web-designer you need to use your judgement to decide how big to make the page and to test the speeds in conditions similar to those of your audience.

Asides from page size, there are various things you can do to make your request faster, including HTTP compression and minimising the number of requests (i.e. combine your scripts into a single include, placing script includes at the bottom of your page and so on...

Here is a helpful tool you can use with Firebug inside of Firefox to view the details of each request...

https://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/