Does your page load size suck? Mine does

Wow. You really did your research. Agreeable that page size shouldn’t be too large for loading purposes but if the images serve their purposes, probably the webmasters may just reduces the resolutions.

looks i need to do a bit of optimising

Oh dear…#2. Whoops.

W00t!!
So i am officially “FDA Approved” ?! I think i’ll put an “FDA Approved” badge on my blog! .. oh, wait.. that might fatten it up..nevermind..

Great list… interesting to note that Vandelay (someone probably very conscious of load size) is second to smallest.

Hmm…Small Fish Big Money, weighing in at 250KB+

This will soon change, we have been planning yet another design release! Load time will be greatly reduced.

Cool list Man!

I am not on your list, but was wandering if you can tell me what my load is.I have a link to your site but can’t find my sites name. What should the load be?

Colin - your page load is 462kb

Randy - You’d have to read that whole page and make sure you fulfilled all their criteria first

ChipSEO - that’s exactly what I thought about Vandelay. That’s some nice work they’ve done there.

Fabien - but for time we’d all be doing redesigns with optimised images an all, wouldn’t we. I’m as guilty as anyone of resizing images in Worpress rather than photoshop.

I imagine that mine has a small size is because I’m more text driven with little to no images beyond pics in the individual articles.

I wonder about the FDA suggestions. They were written on May 27, 2005 9:37:57 AM (at least the page was - Firefox page info).

I do try to keep file size from getting out of hand - but there has to be a mix between size and design, and figuring out what works best in each case.

I personally aim for the 250-350k mark myself.

Oh boy, that is one bad way to get toward the top of any list.

I do favor images as they portray a message. But that isn’t any good if the reader never gets to see it.

So what do I do now? I don’t want to make the images smaller, as I like the width.

Any suggestions?

There are two things you can do to make images lighter. First jpeg is your best format so long as you do not need transparent areas.

(1) Resize each image to the smallest size that suits your blog. This can be a thumbnail you link to a bigger picture or simply a 400 by 300 to fit snuggly in your post. You can crop images (cut away the outside) to get at the most important parts so they don’t get too small.

(2) Compress. By default most JPEG formats compress to about 80% (where 100% is bigger and 0% is not worth looking at) you can often afford to drop to 75 or 70 for most web images.

On top of this some patterns use big images to repeat the background. I’ve seem themes that have a fancy edge and the image was 50 by 85 pixles. The image need only be 1 by 85 to give the same edge and will load 50 times fast. (resize)

Some images are ultra high resolution but look the same on screen at a lower level. (compress).

[...] had a fun post over at PimpMyPageRank.com yesterday comparing the page sizes of a few hundred of the largest blogs. It’s a good read. Tags: Related PostsSiteMeter Sending Your Readers’ Data to [...]

[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]

I also notice this issue and wrote my own post about it on my blog Major Issues With common Blog Layout . And I’m going to write more about it later on.

Whee! Mine is 123kb. And I thought my site is horrendously slow. Phew….Thanks for pointing that I am not ’slow’ in loading time.

I thought mine would be a LOT higher but both my blogs come in at under 200k. I’ll have to do some optimizing though to keep it under 100k…now I know I’ll keep my eye on that!

Thanks for the mention Stuart.

Thank you Lord Matt for your helpful suggestions. I’ll have to look into this and change some things obviously.

Thanks for the great info. I guess I’m not too bad at 165kb especially since I have a lot of stuff on the front page. I was actually afraid mine would be worse. Very interesting and unique post idea.

There are two things you can do to make images lighter. First jpeg is your best format so long as you do not need transparent areas.

This is untrue. The correct format should be used for the correct image. A GIF or PNG should be used for block colour and most graphics, whereas a JPEG should be used for photos and very complex graphics.

If you use JPEG format to save a block colour graphic you’ll either end up with a very large filesize or very pixelated images.

If you’re never sure which one to use, save the image as both formats at their best looking and see which filesize is smaller.

Monika - your post images are mainly photos so these should be JPEG not PNG, however your design images should either be PNG or GIF.

Wow I guess it pays to follow the links in and see who is linking, eh? thanks for the linking and the valuable information. I knew I was heavier than I should be, this puts in in perspective.

This has long been a pet peeve of mine but I should clean my own house first … another thing folks should consider with the current popularity of embedding videos in nearly evert blog post … not only are there still some folks out there with slow connection, but many people at work or government sites have firewalls that block vdeo … some days my browser really locks up for minutes on end trying to get three or 4 posts with video loaded. If your purpose is to get peole to visit, might be better to make the video accessible via a separate link, me thinks. Thanks again.

@ Dave - at least with the videos they’re just embedded, so they don’t load as part of the actual page size. I know what you’re saying though, links would still be better than embedding.

My dad’s on dialup, and he just gives up on half the websites he visits after 30 seconds.

[...] lot of the top bloggers don’t actually pay much attention to this. Take a look at the stats and you’ll see what I mean. I’d actually meant to do a post on the issue myself a few [...]

[...] Does your page load size suck? Mine does [...]

[...] Does your page load size suck? Mine does [...]

What tool do you used to check all these? Can you help me to check mine as well?

Wayne - The tool’s here

I think there is a tool that can compress a page.

Lol, you did your research all right!

I like the messages that images portray, in fact, I like them so much, it’s tough for me to keep my 56k users in mind. Great images don’t do any good without a reader to see it.

Of course my websites page load could be optimized. The issue is that I don’t have time and sin to do it, it costs a lot of time to optimzie your page load. Of course it will grow your revenue.

[...] it’s about six months since I last did my analysis of the page load sizes of the blogs on the 45N5 top 100 (and some) list, so I’ve let my trained monkeys loose again across the [...]