Homepage size

Lanz · 29 Jul 2013 at 23:35

Are there any professional website designers here? If so, would you say that 4.5MB for a homepage is excessive? When I analysis many other popular sites, they are under 1MB is size. This new design seems big to me, causing excessive traffic.

Hutchy · 29 Jul 2013 at 23:48

I would say yes that is large, what's causing the bulk of that 4.5meg?

I'm guessing poorly optimised images?

You can use this to give yourself a breakdown of the resources on the page in an attempt to tone it down: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Lanz · 30 Jul 2013 at 00:01

Yes, that's the tool I used to check.

It's one rotating image on a carousal that is around 3.5MB, would a large image like that controlled by a script potentially experience problem during peak periods?

Westyfield2 · 30 Jul 2013 at 00:07

I've recently got mine down to 700kB, well pleased!

Quick tips are to minify your CSS and JS (with it being on CDN as much as possible of-course), enable gzip in your htaccess if not already, and to seriously optimise your images.
Quick workflow for images that I follow once I've got the resolution correct:

For each image I think about which file type will be best (jpeg/png/gif all have their pros and cons).
Convert colours to colour profile sRGB IEC61966 and then remove the colour profile data from the file.
If jpeg, use the compression until you can see artefacts when zoomed in (normally around 8 I find).
If png, stick it through http://compresspng.com
Then run all images through http://imageoptim.com

Lanz · 30 Jul 2013 at 00:16

Useful, thanks. Although I'm just the server admin guy, I'm trying to push back to the web guys, get them to sort out the html, rather then look at the server side.

3 people in the loop, web, iis admin and me the VM admin. (I know very little about web or iis)

Th3M8dH8tt3r · 30 Jul 2013 at 01:08

4.5mb is just gonna fail on mobile devices. Unless you're not thinking in that manner and are having. Different site for different devices. 4.5mb is just big though.

RoyMi6 · 30 Jul 2013 at 10:42

If one image is 3.5MB the others are likely to be quite large as well and taking up the majority of your 4.5MB total.

Sounds like you just need to fix them and you'll be down to a reasonable amount (under 1MB)

dfarrall · 30 Jul 2013 at 19:00

http://conversionxl.com/dont-use-automatic-image-sliders-or-carousels-ignore-the-fad/

Maccy · 30 Jul 2013 at 19:24

Westyfield2 said:
I've recently got mine down to 700kB, well pleased!

Quick tips are to minify your CSS and JS (with it being on CDN as much as possible of-course), enable gzip in your htaccess if not already, and to seriously optimise your images.
Quick workflow for images that I follow once I've got the resolution correct:
For each image I think about which file type will be best (jpeg/png/gif all have their pros and cons).
Convert colours to colour profile sRGB IEC61966 and then remove the colour profile data from the file.
If jpeg, use the compression until you can see artefacts when zoomed in (normally around 8 I find).
If png, stick it through http://compresspng.com
Then run all images through http://imageoptim.com

Yours doesn't work?!

AJK · 30 Jul 2013 at 19:42

Hutchy said:
I'm guessing poorly optimised images?

RoyMi6 said:
If one image is 3.5MB the others are likely to be quite large as well and taking up the majority of your 4.5MB total.

This, absolutely. Unless the HTML, CSS and JavaScript are absolutely beyond horrific (I won't rule it out, but it's unlikely), they won't account for more than a few hundred KB at worst. Image optimisation is what you need to look at here.

The Google page speed extensions (I use Firefox + Firebug for dev work) are excellent at pointing out page size issues:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights_extensions

Westyfield2 · 30 Jul 2013 at 20:43

Maccy said:
Yours doesn't work?!

I seem to spend all my time creating sites for other people and never actually get round to my own :/