Global reach and dynamic page weight – is there a correlation?

Many reports on web page sizes issued in recent years point to the same conclusion: the web has a weight problem. The web seems to be gaining weight each year despite the fact that study after study has shown a strongly negative reaction from users to heavy web pages and resulting loading times.

We decided to investigate this issue from a mobile web perspective. Picking up from where Guy Podjarny of Akamai left off, we examined the top 100 sites as ranked by Alexa.

Given our mobile focus we did things a little differently: rather than just requesting each page with a different browser window size (to trigger responsive design behaviours) we emulated a range of different devices.

Note: We use the phrase dynamic range to describe the extent to which a site is capable of producing lighter views of the same content depending on the nature of the visiting device. The dynamic range of a page is the ratio of the heaviest version of the page to its lightest. Normally such behaviour is triggered based on device characteristics but network connectivity is increasingly being utilised also. A smartphone at the end of a GPRS connection or poor airport WiFi is effectively a low-end phone.

The results are dramatic. Here is the dynamic range of the top 10 sites:

The main takeaway point is that, despite the general trend towards heavier pages, the top web brands excel at delivering light pages when necessary. The average dynamic range across all sites measured was 26, with a median of 15. In other words, these web brands were capable of changing weight of their primary entry point by a factor of 26, on average. Of all one hundred sites tested only four sites made no attempt to cater for different devices by lightening content, and one of these (Wikipedia) does it for most of the content pages on the site even though it doesn’t do so on the home page. In general, the more global the brand the better the site’s dynamic range.

So what does this mean? It means that if you’re a global web brand you can’t afford to limit your audience with a web presence that excludes devices and territories. Visually squishy layouts are not sufficient and the top sites know this; they cater to the lumpy, uneven web, the realistic web of mixed devices, poor bandwidth and mobile-only nations.

As an example of the importance of this it is recommended to read a very interesting post from Chris Zacharius who talks of his experiences in removing weight from YouTube pages. They found that lightening the default YouTube “watch page” literally opened up entire new markets for them.

The ensuing conversation on Hacker News is also worth reading, particularly this comment.

Conclusion

To paraphrase socialite Wallis Simpson, on the web you can never be too light or too fast. The global web is lumpy and uneven, consumed on diverse devices with myriad connectivity rates in widely varying conditions. It is a mistake not to learn from the top brands—one size decisively does not fit all.