An excerpt from http://www.sitepoint.com/2mb-web-pages-whos-blame/, by @ceeb
I was hoping it was a blip. I was hoping 2015 would be the year of performance. I was wrong. Average web page weight has grown another 7.5% in five months and exceeds 2Mb.
According to the May 15, 2015 HTTP Archive Report, the statistics gathered from almost half a million web pages are:
The biggest rises are for CSS, JavaScript, other files (mostly fonts) and—surprisingly—Flash. The average number of requests per page:
- 100 files in total (up from 95)
- 7 style sheet files (up from 6)
- 20 JavaScript files (up from 18)
- 3 font files (up from 2)
Images remain the biggest issue, accounting for 56 requests and 62% of the total page weight.
Finally, remember these figures are averages. Many sites will have a considerably larger weight.
We're Killing the Web!
A little melodramatic, but does anyone consider 2Mb acceptable? These are public-facing sites—not action games or heavy-duty apps. Some may use a client-side framework, but they should be in the minority.The situation is worse for the third of users on mobile devices. Ironically, a 2Mb responsive site can never be considered responsive on a slower device with a limited—and possibly expensive—mobile connection.
I’ve blamed developers in the past, and there are few technical excuses for not reducing page weight. Today, I’m turning my attention to clients: they’re making the web too complex.
Clients normally view developers as the implementers of their vision. They have a ground-breaking idea which will make millions—once all 1,001 of their “essential” features have been coded. It doesn’t matter how big the project is: clients always want more. Feature-based strategies and “release early, release often” are misunderstood or rejected outright.
The result? 2Mb pages filled with irrelevant cruft, numerous adverts, obtrusive social media widgets, shoddy native interface implementations and pop-ups which are impossible to close on smaller screens.
But we give in to client demands.
Even if you don’t, the vast majority of developers do—and it hurts everyone.
We continue to prioritize features over performance. Adding stuff is easy and it makes clients happy. But users hate the web experience; they long for native mobile apps and Facebook Instant Articles. What’s more, developers know it’s wrong—Web vs Native: Let’s Concede Defeat.