So how big should your web page be? In this interview Reece Lamshed asks John Parnell Pierce to explain the best size for a web page.
Keypoints
- Aiming for a total web page file size around 80 kilobytes is a good idea
- Broadband allows you to have bigger pages
- Text content is usually much less than image sizes
- No more than 2 or three photos
- Links to large files should indicate the size of the destination files
Note: This interview is 6 years old. It was part of a training resource for beginner interactive media students. Though web technology has changed, the principles discussed are still relevant.
Transcript
REECE: In terms of the web page, overall are you trying to meet a level there in terms of the size? And what are you aiming for?
JOHN: Oh definitely. In the past we aimed between 60 and 80 kilobytes and it became a little lax with that now because broadband does allow pages to load quicker. But on a given document, if your web page is largely text, especially if you used style sheets in the design of the site, the text content, you will be lucky if you used 1 or 2 kilobytes. The stuffs that is gonna be big is going to be graphics. So if you look at a page, if you have two or three graphics in a page, that’s how far your gonna go if they are photographs. Two or three photograph, sort of 30 to 50 kilobytes each,plus the HTML code.
REECE: Plus the logo.
JOHN: I think your logo maybe like 5 kilobytes. But you really not want to go over 80 kilobytes most of the time and pretty it’s pretty good etiquette to provide notes to the user if the page they’re going to is a large page, and you can put a warning saying that, you know, this is 300 kilobytes page or 300 kilobytes document, on the link that it goes to. And it becomes a convention especially when you are using things like PDF files or downloadable video files. You actually do put the size of the file in graphics after the link and maybe included, with description of what type of qualities. So if it’s a MPEG file you want put MPEG, if it’s PDF then you want to put PDF.