Is my index page too large?

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Is my index page too large?

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

+2 A:

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.

Erik Forbes 2009-02-06 20:00:08

+6 A:

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?

Rob 2009-02-06 20:00:52

I completely agree. Unfortunately the development-process was "Agile," and much of the layout was determined ad-hoc, sadly. I would like to go back and minify my .css files, join then when possible, and sprite multiple images when time permits.

Jonathan Sampson 2009-02-06 20:04:08

Did you forget the refactoring part of "agile" development?

metanaito 2009-02-06 20:18:20

@webdtc - I'm the sole developer of this project, and the current is powered by upper-management. "Add something on there that contains X information" portrays the type of demands I get on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis :)

Jonathan Sampson 2009-02-06 20:21:04

I didn't mean to be snide. I find that most real projects can't follow ideal processes. Still, this would be a good time to point out to upper-management that "Hey the page is huge partly due to the process"... if you wanted to :) By the way I don't think the page is too big.

metanaito 2009-02-10 23:15:24

ansaurus

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Is my index page too large?

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