Thoughts on Page Weight
November 13th, 2005
Mike M. recently wrote to the PhillyCHI list:
“K size” has become a topic of contention in my organization; some people feel strongly that a few KBs one way or the other can drastically affect how quickly a page loads. While I agree page weight may have some effect on this, there are obviously a number of factors that contribute to the download speed of one site in comparison to others.
That being said, does anyone have experience with (or a good resource for) these kind of issues (optimization of download speed, page weight recommendations, etc.)? I’ve been involved in a baffling number of discussions about whether modifying an arbitrary “K size” limit will affect performance (and/or quality), and I’d love to bring closure to the entire debate with some actual facts.
The Philly folks have made me an honorary member, so I throw in my 2 bits every so often. In this case, this is what I wrote:
We discovered years ago that there is no correlation between actual download speed and the perceived download speed. You can read about our findings here.
Recent studies of ours have re-enforced that this is still true. Perceived download speed is far more related to task completion than to actual speed. If users are complaining about download times, you’re much better off focusing on improving task completion than doing anything about page weight.
There are other good business reasons for reducing page weight (such as bandwidth and server costs), but we’ve found it has little effect on user behavior.
You can see what the Philly group is up to here.
Update: My dear friend, former co-worker, and world-renowned author, Carolyn Snyder, is speaking at Monday night’s PhiCHI meeting (11/14). If you’re in the Philly area, you’d be foolish to let this opportunity go by. Carolyn’s a great speaker and the topic is a must-see.
Tweet
December 31st, 2005 at 2:01 am
I have experience dealing with performance issues — I agree that the perceived page load speed is important. And, consistency in speed is important in the user experience.
Fast is better than slow is something Google found to be true.
Please keep the performance benefits of CSS in mind. Here is a great demonstration page showing how page and table rendering can benefit from style application.