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How Big Should My Web Pages Be?
woman pondering webpage size ow big (how many kilobytes) should a single webpage be? Well that's both an easy and difficult question to answer. The easy answer is "as small as it can be." The difficult answer is more subjective and requires an explanation.

The biggest issue on the Web is bandwidth and transmission speed. How quickly a page will download determines, for some viewers, if they're willing to wait for a page to finish downloading before clicking away. Considering that the average person's attention span in 1998 was 4 seconds, 4 seconds would seem to be the longest download time — at least before something appears in the browser window (to entertain or distract the viewer while the rest of the page loads).

If you take a look at the top dozen sites on the Web (sites like Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Netscape), you would find that the average load time of their home pages is between 10–11 seconds. Yahoo, the most visited site on the Web, has the fastest loading time. It loads in just over 4 seconds on a 56kps modem. Very impressive. Microsoft takes over 20 seconds to load — not as impressive but not too shabby either.

Are the top sites more popular because of their short downloads? Probably not. It's their content. I'm sure, however, that they aren't avoided because of their download speeds either. Some long downloading sites are very popular as well. Are they popular because of their longer downloads? Probably not. I'm betting they're popular in spite of their download speeds. I'm sure that more people would visit these sites if their downloads were quicker.

So, the long and the short answers are the same. Make your webpages as small as possible. Make sure you have a suitable amount of content on each and that they're designed clearly and professionally. Does Yahoo serve up a lot of content in an attractive fashion? It certainly does and they've got the fast downloads and high hit counts to prove it.

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