Webpages are becoming increasingly bloated
Average page weight increases 15% in 2014
Perhaps it should be the web industry’s new year’s resolution to lose weight in 2015, because the size of webpages has been increasing at an alarming rate in recent times. Having gone up by 30% in 2012 and 32% in 2013, a further 15% increase came in 2014.
Let’s put this into context for website owners. Bloated pages adversely affect your profitability:
- Users have a slower experience. It doesn’t matter how great your site looks — people will not wait.
- There’s little point creating a site that works on mobile devices when your pages are 2Mb. Responsive Web Design != a responsive website. Are you losing up to a third of potential customers?
- Google will downgrade your site and harm your search engine optimization efforts (though we’re never sure exactly how much this matters to Google’s algorithm).
- Your hosting costs will increase.
- The more code you use, the more likely it will break. Updates and maintenance are more difficult, take longer and cost more.