It can be quite taxing to keep shaving off page size, in order to accomodate people on dial-up connections. Incidentally, is anyone reading this on dial-up? Once the vast majority of sites started to fill out a bit, the oppresive air of size-restriction began to dissipate ushering in a new era of more attractive and visually appealing sites.
I felt it was a pity then when Google announced that it would begin taking into account page download times as part of it's ranking of a site. This is not to be confused with the Page Quality score that Google AdWords uses to determine which are the best pages for ads.
Here's a quote from Google released a while back:
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings...
There's two ways you can increase your page loading times:
- Decrease webpage sizes
- Increase bandwidth and transfer rate
The second option might require you to upgrade hosting package with your provider, or move elsewhere, but it should only be seriously considered if you have already shaved down webpage sizes as much as you can without impacting useability or making undesired sacrifices on aesthetics.
In general, it's good practice to keep webpages small. It will save you money in the long run because inevitably the site will require less resources. It remains a bit of a balancing act because you also don't want to get left behind with boring text only pages while your comeptitors' are creating exciting, rich interfaces that capitalize on the bigger, better and faster Internet.
You can test out webpage speed by going to Alexa and viewing your website profile there. It should contain an average load time reading, like so:
Average Load Time for xyz.com Fast (1.833 Seconds), 62% of sites are slower. Note: Slow sites may be penalized by search engines.
