Webpages showing sharp growth in girth
Webpages showing sharp growth in girth Slowly but surely, webpages are getting bigger and bigger It is not just humans that are steadily growing in girth, webpages are going the same way too. The average page is now about 965 kilobytes in size, reveals a study of top sites by the HTTP Archive. The figure is 33% up on the same period in 2010 when the average webpage was a svelte 726 kilobytes. Keeping webpages small is likely to become more important as increasing numbers of people browse the web on the move. Analysis suggests the bloat is down to user demands for more interactivity, as well as the tools used to watch what happens when people visit a site. Speed trap To gather its figures, the HTTP Archive ran a series of tests every month on the web's top 1,000 sites. These showed that average webpage sizes were trending steadily upward throughout 2011 and jumped sharply in October. Big pages generally take longer to load, which can mean visitors