DRASTIC Occassional Paper: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A quick survey of website size and download speeds for some of the most popular sites on the Internet. Rob Longhurst 19-Dec-2006 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Introduction
In my MSc dissertation on the viability of Internet businesses in the developing world (See http://www.drasticom.org/dissertationhome.htm ), I suggested that as high speed bandwidth has become more affordable in the developed world, so website page sizes have bloated, delivering a graphically rich experience to those who are lucky enough to have access to fast Internet connections.
Various studies in the developed world have shown that users begin to find frustration levels increasing if the have to wait more that 5-6 seconds for a webpage to load. Abandonment rates increase as the load times increase. If we took a page load time of 12 seconds as being the maximum acceptable, we could derive the connection speed which should be available to each user to accomplish this.
Survey method
All data was collected on December 19th, 2006.
Results
* The content of this page seemed to be much bigger than the recorded size suggests. It is assumed that the analysis tool is not recording the total size of the data which is displayed, for some reason.
Analysis
Most of the pages recorded here have been designed to work well on high speed connections. Given that average access speeds in the developing world are typically in the 12-20kbps range in the average Internet café, browsing such sites is likely to be a frustrating experience. This is not helped when sites such as detik.com (in the Indonesian language) are built with very big pages. (Presumably they are emulating western style but without the attention to optimization which western web producers often give.) One has to question if the web will achieve the widespread use in the developing world that it has achieved in the developed world unless access times can be reduced by either:
The methods used by the Web Page Analyzer have not been researched, so it is not possible to comment on the accuracy of the numbers shown, but it is thought that they are at least indicative.
Conclusions
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© Copyright DRASTIC, 2005-2006 |