More Hosting Bandwidth Required As Average Page Size Increases

The HTTP Archive has spent the previous couple of years studying the size of web pages available on the internets top 1000 sites.

Latest Figures

Their latest figure demonstrates that over the last year of 2011 the average size of a page has increased by 33%. During 2010 the average web page had been 726 KB in size. For the period of 2011 this statistic inflated to an average of 965 KB for each web page, with a sharp increase in the size of each page during October 2011.

For end users of mobile devices, exploring websites with these kinds of heavy pages could result in a negative user experience, since many portable gadgets possess limited bandwidth capacities. It is thought that the increased usage of HTML 5 and JavaScript are usually the primary contributing factors to the page size increase trend.

On-Page Statistics

On page web statistics and analytics also have been attributed as a important contributor to the size of web pages. A major contributing aspect to the increasing average page size is the trend towards larger and more high-definition graphics being used on websites. This is sure to be a continuing trend throughout the coming years not only affecting mobile devices, but the actual website hosting infrastructure such as web servers and network devices.

Due to lack of online bandwidth currently offered for mobile gadgets, we believe many web sites will begin to produce content based on which type of device is opening the web page. The idea of delivering diverse web content based on the device opening the page is not a new concept, nevertheless only a small fraction of the current website stock currently implements any kind of device recognition and delivery optimisation techniques. The shortage of current optimisation is mainly due to most website owners assuming that there is no requirement for such differentiation.

Lack Of Knowledge

In addition the knowledge and methods required to apply content delivery optimisation are not widely distributed within the web design industry. Many web designers the self taught and as such, are often unaware of the ability to create such device-based optimised websites. Website designers with knowledge of producing device optimised sites are expected to be in strong demand over the coming years as domain owners begin to see increased user engagement via mobile devices.