Page Weight, Speed & Good Ol’ Google Juice
Monday, April 12th, 2010
As tempting as it is to imagine a world around us empowered by ever-expanding broadband connections the real world tells us a different story. Page weights over the last few years have increased dramatically. Its time to reconsider our delusions.
Google has announced that Page Speed will be Factored into Google Search Rankings because it affects psychological outcomes of users and business outcomes – bailout rates and damage to perceived credibility. Google is telling web professionals the way forward is to discard our delusional worldview of a broadband utopia and face the facts.
WebSiteOptimization.com state the average web page size tripled between 2003 and 2005 from 93.7KB to 312KB with some home pages reaching 4MB to 10MB. While the average number of objects called on web pages in that period grew from 25.7 to 49.9 creating an object overhead cost.
In my opinion this is absolutely crazy at a time in technological history when mobile web browsing has begun to skyrocket. If devices like my kick arse desktop with 2GB RAM and a reasonable graphics card over an ADSL 2 connection in an inner city suburb find the web slowing down – then what about these guys? Mobile devices like smart phones? And dare I suggest the iPad, yes the iPad which is now a giant on our web design radar, might be an evolution? And what about non-broadband connected users?
The direction of innovation is arguably in mobile application not bandwidth consumption – examples like the rural cell movement in India and Eko banking in Africa.
What about the growing markets of Asia and Africa which may have a predominantly hand-held consumer because setting up mobile is a lot easier and cheaper than running a gazillion miles of fibre optic cable around China?
The question is whether web developers and designers are willing to start pulling their heads in on this topic.
Web professionals need to come back to the basic premise that a large part of our skill is in making design decisions that compromise between size and speed in our products. Its not about whether the designer’s portfolio meets a Hollywood expectation – projects are about meeting business outcomes including usability, accessibility and conversion of bums on seats to revenue / eyeballs / relationship buy-in.
