The average web page is 3MB. How much should we care?

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Geoff Graham on

Tammy Everts with a deep dive into the average page size, which seems to grow year in and year out.

It’s a little perplexing that the average page size trends up each year as performance has become a growing concern on the forefront of our minds, but Tammy has keen insights that are worth reading because she suggests that user experience isn’t always about page size and that bloat is far from the only metric we should be concerned.

Correlating page size with user experience is like presenting someone with an entire buffet dinner and assuming that it represents what they actually ate. To properly measure user experience, we need to focus on the content – such as the navbar or hero product image – that users actually want to consume. The best performance metric for measuring user experience is one that measures how long the user waits before seeing this critical content.

Spot on. There is such a thing as making intentional use of file size, depending on whether or goal is super fast load times or communicating an idea. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but the trade-off can certainly exist.

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