From HTML to JavaScript, images, and video files, there are many factors that influence the size of a website. By adding up the individual components, you can determine the size of each page, which can affect more than just the carbon footprint: loading speed, mobile search efficiency and web hosting costs. Let us show you how!
The ever-expanding pool of new tools and resources—images, videos, custom fonts, different resources, etc.—has enabled that we’re seeing more and more websites every year. The current average size of a web page is around 2286.3 KB (measured on February 7, 2023). The increase is the most striking in the last 10 years, with the size of desktop viewed pages growing by 184% and mobile viewed pages by 420%. In this 10-year interval, the biggest contributors to the size of webpages have been various image and video files, as well as creative elements.
LOADING SPEED
Website load time plays a big part in search ranking: pages that load faster are placed higher in the results, hence attracting more visitors. For e-commerce sites, an increase in load time can also lead to a direct decrease in revenue, as users who are not satisfied with the page load speed tend not to return. Smaller websites load faster and are more popular with consumers.
MOBILE SEARCH
The rise of smartphones has led to an increasing share of mobile internet usage by users, who naturally also use search engines on these portable devices. In October 2022, mobile devices were responsible for 59.4% of the internet traffic. 53% of visitsors also leave the site if it takes longer than 3 seconds for the page to load, which is a big problem for mobile devices because they are inherently slower to load, and Google’s SEO ranking very much takes mobile activity into account. So there’s no doubt that it’s worth optimizing the average size of web pages so that they load faster on smartphones, too.
BANDWIDTH – WEB HOSTING COSTS
The hosting provider estimates the required bandwidth based on the size of the website, the number of subpages and traffic patterns. Therefore, a website with large pages will need much more bandwidth, although the total access speed will take into account the servers and the different internet speeds in different countries. One of the best solutions is to keep the size of your website below the global average of 2286.3 KB, avoiding unnecessary extra costs.
CARBON FOOTPRINT
The size of a website influences even more than the factors listed above. Because the more complex and larger a website is, the more energy it needs, and the higher its carbon footprint. According to the Website Carbon Calculator tests, a website on average generates 0.5 CO2e per page load, so a site with 100,000 page loads per month will emit 600 kg of carbon dioxide per year. Tests have shown a wide range of results: a site without as much content produces 0.24 grams of CO2e per page load, while a larger page that uses automatic video playback to attract visitors generates 10.08 grams of CO2e per page load. The size of a page can be reduced without sacrificing much by simply optimizing its content.
How can you reduce the size of your website? We will be exploring this in a series of articles in the coming weeks. Come back to our blog later or subscribe to our newsletter so we can keep you posted!
Sources:
https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight
https://www.keycdn.com/support/the-growth-of-web-page-size
https://www.seoptimer.com/blog/webpage-size/
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/internet-carbon-footprint
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