Is my index page too large?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/521921

Question

I'm developing a site right now that I've been working on for more than a year. Today, I am about one week from launching so I started going over things that I've not gone over during the last year - including loading-times. I've not noticed any loading-issues, but I still wanted to look.

The following represents my index page:

Documents (1 file)       22 KB
Images (53 files)        96 KB
Objects (0 files)   
Scripts (9 files)        90 KB - Including jQuery.min.js
Style Sheets (6 files)   23 KB
-------------------------------
                Total   230 KB

We no longer live in the world of 56k's and 28.8's, but I'm wondering what should be considered too large now today. I should mention also that Analytics reports 3.28% of my visitors having dial-up. These users currently browse an index page that is 158kb in size.

Other interesting index page sizes:

  • Google: 20kb
  • Amazon: 525kb
  • StackOverflow: 121kb
  • Digg: 58kb
  • Revision3: 936kb
Was it helpful?

Solution

Not a direct answer, but the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance web site is packed with articles and tips on front-end engineering issues such as these, which can affect the user perception of site load times.

In particular, I'd suggest that it might be possible to reduce the number of HTTP requests being made - six stylesheets and 59 images, for example - perhaps some of those images could be sprited to reduce that figure?

OTHER TIPS

That's pretty big, but I wouldn't consider it a problem until/unless it becomes a problem. Be wary of premature optimization in any context.

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow
scroll top