Fry-IT

10 largest page sizes

By: Peter Bengtsson, 7th of December 2006

7^th of December 2006

Some of the really big and popular sites spew out loads of data, especially if you include the all elements such as CSS, Javascript, images and CSS images.

I was reading this lovely article called Victims of their own success about how big and slow some of the most popular sites are in bytes and seconds. The author of the article who did the benchmark didn't measure the total size of the downloadble content which does include CSS, JS and images. This counts too. I've made my own little table of what the page sizes are for these sites if you include everything that makes a site's size.

^* Wasn't able to find out for these sites.

A lot of the elements that makes up a page like the nytimes.com frontpage are elements with cache headers set such that they are locally cached by the client which means less bandwidth usage. But I know from experience that it's only a matter of about 10-33% that can be saved like this because the cache headers aren't set for sufficiently long time and a large part of your visitors are (within a relatively short timespan) new visitors who have nothing cached.

So?

Don't judge why a site is slow by the site's HTML document size. That's just a small part of the total bandwidth and server traffic. On a page like nytimes.com frontpage, less than 20% of the total size is HTML.

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