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Are you a web developer or an SEO expert trying to improve your site's performance and loading times? Or you may be wondering what you can do to make your site more responsive. One of the best ways to improve your site's loading speed is by decreasing page size.
But how does that work? We answer this and more in this article. Read on to find out how to use the page size checker tool to turn your slow webpage into a high-performing one.
Modern-day internet users do not have the patience to wait long for a web page to load. They expect a web page to load in an instant. A short web page should be around 15KB in size to load quickly. The more media presence on a site, the bigger it is and the longer it takes to load.
Hence, knowing the size of a webpage is crucial to its health and performance.
Page size, also known as page weight, refers to the overall size of a particular web page. Embedded videos, images, audio, graphics, and other media bits add to a page's size.
A page size checker is a tool used to check the webpage size of a particular URL. It indicates the size of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, audio, video, and other libraries.
These elements have become essential to modern websites as most try to cater to visitors with heightened expectations. Visitors expect engaging multimedia content on websites, and to meet this need, many web developers are adding more and more heavily weighted elements to websites.
However, if this is not done within a limit, websites will be significantly slowed down even if visitors have high-speed internet. Since search engines consider loading speed when ranking a webpage, you need to know your webpage size.
Thus, page checker tools come in very handy to determine the size of a website and the amount of time it takes to load due to this size. These tools can calculate the exact size of a webpage which can help you make necessary changes to improve loading speeds.
This is becoming increasingly important as your competitor sites will employ the same tools to optimize loading speeds. If your site is slow, then visitors may leave your site to go to a competitor's.
For your convenience, below is a guide on how to use our page size checker tool and improve your site's size and load speed:
Remember that the smaller the webpage size, the better it will load. The recommended size is below 3 MB, depending on the site's function. It's OK to have a site size close to 3MB for an e-commerce site, but it is unacceptable on a regular page with just some text.
For web developers, a page size checker tool is beneficial to access. Since many things can affect page size, it is crucial for them to regularly check their web pages to see if the size is within acceptable limits and thus have a highly responsive web page.
For digital marketing executives, the end goal of a webpage is to drive traffic, be engaging and successfully convert visitors to customers. They try to achieve this by using both paid and organic strategies.
However, being the top-ranked does not matter if your webpage takes forever to load. This will lead to visitors leaving and increase the site's bounce rate, which will, in turn, lower its ranking.
Thus, digital marketers must use a page size checker tool to ensure that users can use it seamlessly.
This is especially important when the site is updated, so the page is always running smoothly, just like previous versions, as visitors do not have the patience to wait for a site to load. Any delay, and they will be moving on to a competing site.
A recent survey found that average webpages weigh around 2000 KB for desktop versions and 1800 KB for mobile versions, a noticeable increase from earlier sizes of 1500 KB and 1350KB for desktop and mobile versions, respectively.
Some websites employ 'heavy' elements in custom fonts, full-screen video, and other design elements, while others prefer a more minimalistic approach with simple texts and backgrounds.
The size of a page also depends on the industry or company that owns the page. E-commerce sites have many elements, including high-resolution images, and thus would be larger, especially compared to a simple resume/personal site.
Therefore, ideally, you would want your webpage to be around 3MB. Any larger than that, and you may lose out on ranking boosts, while if it's smaller, your page may lose out on providing a good user experience and be less helpful to visitors. Thus, balance is the key.
In terms of websites, bigger isn't always better. Smaller webpages download much quicker when looked up and when it comes to downloading a webpage, every second matters.
Web page sizes are crucial for the performance of a site. The source code size is no longer an issue as most people use broadband connections. However, having a lot of content can cause latency in a webpage.
Slow-loading websites cause an increase in bounce rate as many visitors may leave the site if it takes too long to load. Smaller page sizes can also mean lower hosting costs as there will be lower bandwidth required to host your site.
Most crucially, though, a webpage's size impacts SEO. Google and others consider webpage loading times and bounce rates to determine a site's ranking.
If your site is too large compared to your competitors, it will load much slower, which will cause an increased bounce rate and cause your webpage to rank below.
There can be a multitude of factors that may affect your page size, but below are a few that impact your page size and thus loading speeds.
When you include default CSS and JavaScript, you must make sure that you're also optimizing this code for page load. To do so, you must minimize the code and ensure there isn't too much unnecessary code that may 'bloat' your webpage and increase its size.
CSS and JavaScript files should be minimized as much as possible by removing extra spaces and code artifacts that are unnecessary.
Minimization won't change the actual coding; it will only impact coding artifacts. The rest is up to you. You need to figure out the best ways to optimize your CSS and JavaScript code on the server-side.
If you have a large DOM tree size, it can have a significant impact on your page speed. A large DOM size impacts network efficiency, load performance, runtime performance, and memory performance, affecting your page load and user experience.
When developing your website, you must ensure that resources are allocated adequately to optimize DOM tree size.
Large images can increase your page size, disrupting the user experience. If a user has to wait minutes for an image to load, you will probably lose them—this is why pixel size and image dimensions should be considered when compressing images for your webpage.
Custom fonts can be around 0.5MB in size, and this will cause your webpage size to increase. That's why many sites use the browser default fonts to save on space.
Videos used on webpages should be compressed using formatting such as MPEGs to make the data as small as possible. Also, loading speed may decrease significantly if the video is set to auto-play.
Below are a few tried and tested ways you can improve loading speed by decreasing the size of your webpage:
Images are one of the most significant contributors to page size, and if you want to reduce loading time, resizing unnecessarily large images can be a good idea.
Remember to keep the image dimensions within the container when uploading images —many make the mistake of using a 1000-pixel image in a container that holds 500 pixels.
But in cases where you would like if there is a high-resolution image available for download, it is recommended you use an image that is precisely the size of the container but include a hyperlink to the high-resolution version.
You can also shrink the size of an image by compressing it and reducing its file size. But the most effective thing to do is remove any unnecessary images from your webpage.
Another tool you can use to reduce loading times is CSS sprites. A CSS sprite is a collection of images that combine to make one file, making it easier to access as it reduces the number of server requests required to load the page, lowering loading times.
Although custom fonts are fun to use and add some personality to your site, which can help you differentiate yourself from other sites, they come with the cost of being large, increasing loading times.
However, if you're looking for a simple way to reduce the size of your site, removing unnecessary custom fonts is a good place to start.
Although one or two custom fonts won't do too much damage, overstuffing your page with custom fonts will lower the performance of your webpage.
Reducing resources through minification is an excellent way to improve page load speeds. Minification removes unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the browser processes the resource. It is done by removing code comments, formatting, unused code, shorter variables, and function names.
You can also use multiple tools to simplify your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS resources simply and easily to improve your site's performance drastically.
A CDN is a network that ensures that elements of your webpage that is difficult to load are stored in servers worldwide instead of just one place.
For example, suppose your website's content is stored in Sydney, Australia. In that case, this is good news for visitors nearby as they will get incredible loading speeds. But what if you have a loyal visitor in South Africa? They will have a much longer waiting time unless you employ a CDN.
Although this won't reduce your page size, it will improve your loading speeds.
Adding a plugin is not as harmless as it seems. If you add multiple plugins at a time, your webpage's performance can significantly impact the user experience for any visitors you may have.
You should limit your plugin use to only those who serve a purpose or adds functionality to your webpage. It is an entirely avoidable issue if considered during the development phase.
Here are a few reasons to convince you why using a page size checker is essential:
A page checker tool will save you from manually calculating each domain's page size. All you have to do is enter your URL into the tool, and you can get results instantly. This saves you time and effort, which you can invest in other worthwhile tasks.
Most page size tests, including ours, is completely free to use. All you have to do is enter your URL and see the results. There is no need to thank us!
When you begin regularly checking your page size and taking steps to lower it, you will see that your page will start to load better and thus decrease your bounce rate.
When your bounce rate decreases, it will also increase your traffic.
Google considers page loading speed as one of its 200 ranking factors. If you use a page size checker and improve your size accordingly, you can rank higher than slower pages.
Your page size can be the thing that determines your webpage's success. Many have mistakenly overused plugins, using large images and unnecessary font to wow users. Still, they have only ended up with slow load pages, frustrating users.
Determining your page size is a crucial step in technical SEO and should be paid more attention to. And thus, our tool, with its straightforward interface and lightning-fast calculations, can help you trim your website into being super responsive and thus appealing to users and search engines.
Munir Hasan
Head of Youth Programme
Dhaka Office:
Plot 60, Road 20, Sector 11, Uttara, Dhaka -1230, BD.
London Office:
27, Old Gloucester Street,
London, WC1N 3AX, UK.
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