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For 2023 (and 2024 ...) - we are now fully retired from IT training.
We have made many, many friends over 25 years of teaching about Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, Java, C and C++ - and MySQL, Linux and Solaris/SunOS too. Our training notes are now very much out of date, but due to upward compatability most of our examples remain operational and even relevant ad you are welcome to make us if them "as seen" and at your own risk.

Lisa and I (Graham) now live in what was our training centre in Melksham - happy to meet with former delegates here - but do check ahead before coming round. We are far from inactive - rather, enjoying the times that we are retired but still healthy enough in mind and body to be active!

I am also active in many other area and still look after a lot of web sites - you can find an index ((here))
How big is a web page these days? Does the size of your pages matter?

According to the BBC, the average web page is up in size from 726 kBytes to 965 kBytes in the last year. See [here]. Does this matter?

I first browsed the web with a modem - I remember stepping through modem generations at 9.6k, 19.2k, 28k, 33k and 56k bits / second. The slower speeds were used with email and newsgroups - I think web pages came when speed was around 33k, and I remember that we were always being told that we were pushing the limits of modem technology in those days. And in those days, to browse every bite mattered. Today's average page - as told by the BBC - would have taken nearly five minutes to download at 33k, even assuming flat out use of the phone line. Broadband - which we had installed in around 2000 - leapt speed up from 56k to 500k (Half Meg) and had grown since - our connections are now running at up to 100 Mbits, and that 5 minute download could now be completed five times every second.

But not everyone has a good broadband connection. Some parts of the country are slower. And mobile access is much slower, and a significant part of the market. So it still pays to look at your page size and tune your site.

So what makes for one of those average BBC pages of nearly a Megabyte?

HTML - these should very rarely be a large proportion of big pages, even though they're usually the page names you call up. The HTML element of web pages you download will include the text of the page, and instructions as to what other resources to pull in to complete the page - and those elements are where the majority of your page load time will be taken.

Style - Cascading Style Sheets describe the look and feel of your web page. The CSS may be included within the HTML page, but more usually it's a separate resource called up from within the HTML. Like the HTML, the size of the CSS really shouldn't be all that large - but it's all too easy to clutter up your style file with loads of extra and redundant styles - making maintenance all the harder, and slightly slowing downloads of the page as a whole.

Images - Commonly .jpg, .gif or .png files. A picture paints a thousand words, but, alas, sometimes a picture's download is slower that ten thousand words. With screen resolution and line speed increased, there are reasons for images to be larger than they were a year or two ago, but it's still all to easy to design a web page that loads images to a far higher resolution than it needs to, with a significant effect on download time at no real gain.

JavaScript - According to the BBC's report, this is the huge growth area this year. With libraries such as JQuery downloaded within your pages, load size can rocket. JQuery, for example, can come down as 1/4 Mbyte. Very impressive, very powerful - but you should be very careful. Similarly with Flash, Java Applets, ActiveX components

But, alas, it's not that simple in practice

• Each page of HTML on a website will be different. But the Style Sheet, much of the JavaScript, and many of the images will repeat from page to page, and will be cached by the browser. That way, repeated downloads are substantially avoided.

• Many page requests of a web server are made by automated and robotic applications, which are unlikely to call up the subsidiary pages.

• Downloads may also include video streams, large .pdf documents, software, audio streams and much more which may effect the statistics.

Our own story - www.wellho.net

In November 2010, the average download size of a page called up by a real user was 63k bytes, comprising 3.25 requests on the server (1 HTML file, a style sheet, and an image or two)

In November 2011, the average download size had grown to 90k. We were being somewhat more efficient in caching, as the number of requests onto the server per page had dropped, indicating an improvement in caching.

Our page breadth remains tiny compared to the average - but like the average it has grown. That's not Javascript in our case - it's largely a conscious decision to use larger images and to allow them to download and be cached at a higher resolution. Newer pages are using the more detailed images, so I would expect the 90k figure to continue to grow - perhaps to around 110k or 120k over the next year or two, barring other changes.

Our stats are based on server accesses in November 2010 and November 2011, totaling 7,100,000 accesses of which 5,270,000 were real user requests comprising about 1,850,000 page requests and their subsidiary requests over the sum of the two 30 day periods.

You can see the source of the program we used (Perl) for our own stats [here].
(written 2011-12-26, updated 2011-12-31)

 
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
W512 - Web and Intranet - Site Design Aspects
  [229] A fortunate accident - (2005-02-27)
  [261] Putting a form online - (2005-03-29)
  [288] Colour blindness for web developers - (2005-04-22)
  [319] Accommodation and landing pages - (2005-05-21)
  [345] Spotting a denial of service attack - (2005-06-12)
  [352] Improved mining techniques! - (2005-06-19)
  [391] One mans pleasure is another mans poison - (2005-07-26)
  [510] Dynamic Web presence - next generation web site - (2005-11-29)
  [556] Colour doesn't have to mean colourful - (2006-01-06)
  [649] Denial of Service ''attack'' - (2006-03-17)
  [718] Protecting images from theft - (2006-05-12)
  [795] Remember a site's non-technical issues too - (2006-07-07)
  [823] An excellent use for a visitor count? - (2006-08-05)
  [859] Put the answer in context - it may be printed - (2006-09-08)
  [918] Databases needn't be frightening, hard or expensive - (2006-11-08)
  [1015] Search engine placement - long term strategy and success - (2006-12-30)
  [1047] Maintainable code - some positive advice - (2007-01-21)
  [1054] UK legal requirements for your commercial web site - (2007-01-27)
  [1353] Mood shots - (2007-09-16)
  [1598] Every link has two ends - fixing 404s at the recipient - (2008-04-02)
  [2214] Global Index to help you find resources - (2009-06-01)
  [3517] Tags used in writing this blog - (2011-11-12)
  [3589] Promoting a single one of your domains on the search engines - (2012-01-22)

W502 - Web and Intranet - HTML Document Anatomy
  [857] Strikingly busy - (2006-09-06)
  [993] Positioning with Cascading Style Sheets - (2006-12-16)
  [1160] HTML - example of a simple web page - (2007-04-24)
  [1187] Updating a page strictly every minute (PHP, Perl) - (2007-05-14)
  [1431] Getting the community on line - some basics - (2007-11-13)
  [1463] All the special characters in HTML ... - (2007-12-07)
  [1811] Alternative URLs using % symbol encoding - (2008-09-27)
  [2246] What difference does using the XHTML standard really make? - (2009-06-18)
  [2675] Redirecting to your main domain for correct security keys - (2010-03-13)
  [4034] The VERY basics of a web page ... and web site - (2013-03-09)

G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility
  [23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)
  [32] Web design platoon - (2004-08-29)
  [98] No more 'Error 404' pages. Something better. - (2004-10-24)
  [109] URLs - a service and not a hurdle - (2004-11-04)
  [117] A case of case - (2004-11-14)
  [142] Colour for access - (2004-12-06)
  [165] Implementing an effective site search engine - (2005-01-01)
  [173] Data Mining - (2005-01-09)
  [179] The hunt for unique words - (2005-01-16)
  [182] Your personal Google ranking - (2005-01-19)
  [197] Allow for peak traffic on your web site - (2005-02-01)
  [202] Searching for numbers - (2005-02-04)
  [222] Who are all these visitors? - (2005-02-20)
  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
  [268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
  [274] Our most popular resources - (2005-04-10)
  [276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
  [278] Cover all the options - (2005-04-13)
  [284] The Iconish language - (2005-04-19)
  [311] Growth pains - (2005-05-14)
  [314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
  [320] Ordnance Survey - using a 'Get a map' - (2005-05-22)
  [322] More maps - (2005-05-23)
  [347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
  [348] Graveyard pages - (2005-06-15)
  [369] CMS - the minefield of Choices - (2005-07-05)
  [376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
  [414] Form Madness - (2005-08-14)
  [492] New Navigation Aid - Launch of My Wellho - (2005-11-11)
  [528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
  [533] Bigger Box Campaign - (2005-12-18)
  [658] Keeping the visitors happy and browsing - (2006-03-26)
  [681] Mirroring a dynamic site - (2006-04-12)
  [732] Where is a web site visitor browsing from - (2006-05-24)
  [757] Horse and Python training - (2006-06-12)
  [767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
  [800] Effective web campaign? - (2006-07-12)
  [893] Visibility - (2006-10-14)
  [916] Driving customers away - (2006-11-07)
  [976] Santa at the station - (2006-12-09)
  [994] Training on Cascading Style Sheets - (2006-12-17)
  [1029] Our search engine placement is dropping. - (2007-01-11)
  [1055] Above the fold - (2007-01-28)
  [1104] Drawing dynamic graphs in PHP - (2007-03-09)
  [1177] Sorting out for a site map - (2007-05-05)
  [1184] Finding resources - some pointers - (2007-05-13)
  [1186] Two new pages / sites - (2007-05-14)
  [1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
  [1207] Simple but effective use of mod_rewrite (Apache httpd) - (2007-05-27)
  [1212] What brought YOU to our web site? - (2007-06-01)
  [1237] What proportion of our web traffic is robots? - (2007-06-19)
  [1297] Stuffing content into a web page - easy maintainance - (2007-08-09)
  [1437] Above the fold with First Great Western - (2007-11-19)
  [1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
  [1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
  [1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
  [1513] Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python! - (2008-01-20)
  [1534] Where in the world / country is my visitor from? - (2008-02-07)
  [1541] Colour, Composition or Content - (2008-02-16)
  [1554] Online hotel reservations - Melksham, Wiltshire (near Bath) - (2008-02-24)
  [1610] PHP course dot co, dot uk - (2008-04-13)
  [1630] To provide external links, or not? - (2008-05-04)
  [1634] Kiss and Book - (2008-05-07)
  [1653] How do Google Ads work? - (2008-05-25)
  [1711] Rapid growth leads to server move - (2008-07-17)
  [1747] Who is watching you? - (2008-08-10)
  [1756] Ever had One of THOSE mornings? - (2008-08-16)
  [1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)
  [1797] I have been working hard but I do not expect you noticed - (2008-09-14)
  [1833] Web Bloopers - good form design - avoiding pitfalls - (2008-10-11)
  [1856] A few of my favourite things - (2008-10-26)
  [1888] Find the link - (2008-11-16)
  [1955] How to avoid duplicating web page maintainance - (2008-12-20)
  [1961] Making our things easier to find - (2008-12-26)
  [1970] Plagarism - who is copying my pages? - (2009-01-02)
  [1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)
  [2056] Web Site Loading - experiences and some solutions shared - (2009-02-26)
  [2065] Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others - (2009-03-03)
  [2225] How important is a front page ranking on a search engine? - (2009-06-09)
  [2332] Formation, des langages Open Source - (2009-08-09)
  [2333] Formaci[83][c2]ón, de los lenguajes de c[83][c2]ódigo abierto - (2009-08-09)
  [2334] Formazione, Open Source computer lingue - (2009-08-09)
  [2335] Ausbildung, die Open-Source-Sprachen - (2009-08-09)
  [2336] Forma[83][c2]ç[83][c2]ão, Open Source computador l[83][c2]ínguas - (2009-08-09)
  [2337] Opleiding, Open Source computertalen - (2009-08-09)
  [2338] Uddannelse, Open Source computer sprog - (2009-08-09)
  [2339] Oppl[83][c2]æring, Open Source datamaskinen spr[83][c2]åk - (2009-08-09)
  [2340] ldning, Open Source dator spr[83][c2]åk - (2009-08-09)
  [2341] Koulutus, Open Source tietokone kielill[83][c2]ä - (2009-08-09)
  [2389] Writing with our customers words - (2009-09-01)
  [2410] Removal of technical resources from this site - (2009-09-19)
  [2519] Status Page / breaks of service in early December - (2009-11-30)
  [2532] Analysing Google arrivals by country of origin - (2009-12-10)
  [2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
  [2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
  [2668] Is it worth it? - (2010-03-09)
  [2981] How to set up short and meaningfull alternative URLs - (2010-10-02)
  [3022] Retaining web site visitors - reducing the one page wonders - (2010-10-31)
  [3087] Making the most of critical emails - reading behind the scene - (2010-12-16)
  [3149] Looking back at www.wellho.net - (2011-01-28)
  [3197] Finding and diverting image requests from rogue domains - (2011-03-08)
  [3367] Google +1 - what is it? - (2011-07-22)
  [3426] Automed web site testing scripted in Ruby using watir-webdriver - (2011-09-09)
  [3491] Who is knocking at your web site door? Are you well set up to deal with allcomers? - (2011-10-21)
  [3532] Sharing the user experience - designing a form with the customer in mind - (2011-11-29)
  [3554] Learning more about our web site - and learning how to learn about yours - (2011-12-17)
  [3623] Some TestWise examples - helping use Ruby code to check your web site operation - (2012-02-24)
  [3734] QR codes with marketing logos embedded - (2012-05-16)
  [3744] Short Web Addresses for Melksham - (2012-05-30)
  [3745] Legal change - You need to obtain user consent if you use cookies on your website - (2012-06-01)
  [3776] Some traps it's so easy to fall into in designing your web site - (2012-06-23)
  [3896] An email marathon - (2012-10-15)
  [3974] TV show appearance - how does it effect your web site? - (2013-01-13)
  [4001] Helping search engines with appropriate 400 error codes - (2013-02-11)
  [4076] Web site - fully back! - (2013-04-29)
  [4115] More or less back - what happened to our server the other day - (2013-06-14)
  [4136] How do I post automatically from a PHP script to my Twitter account? - (2013-07-10)
  [4239] Facebook marketing - early experiences - (2014-01-19)
  [4376] Well House Consultants, Well House Manor, First Great Western Coffee shop, TransWilts / 2014 web site reports - (2015-01-01)
  [4401] Selecting RECENT and POPULAR news and trends for your web site users - (2015-01-19)
  [4474] Effect on external factors on traffic to our web sites - an update - (2015-04-26)
  [4492] Almost so wrong, but perhaps it's right for some? - (2015-05-11)


Back to
Christmas Day - for unique pictures
Previous and next
or
Horse's mouth home
Forward to
I wish I was not a special case
Some other Articles
First of the year
Initial thoughts - response to GW Rail Franchise Consultation for Wiltshire
What would an appropriate train service on the TransWilts line mean
I wish I was not a special case
How big is a web page these days? Does the size of your pages matter?
Christmas Day - for unique pictures
Happy Christmas ... a Christmas morning walk in Melksham
Melksham, Month by month through 2011
Well House Consultants - Open Source Programming Courses for 2012
Python or Lua - which should I use / learn?
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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