The Website Obesity Crisis

There is a very interesting article that talks about The Website Obesity Crisis and it is well worth reading. The author, Maciej Cegłowski, talks about how web pages are becoming increasingly bloated and this is slowing down the internet.

Browsing websites should be fast and easy these days because we have high speed internet connections. I have fibre optic internet with connection speeds of around 35Mbit, but quite often web pages load hardly any faster than 15 years ago when I had a 56k dial-up modem.

I too, have noticed web pages getting bigger and bigger. Some can be as much as 5MB, which is unthinkable a few years ago. I remember the days when it was advisable to create web pages that were under 100k. Now they are 2, 3 4 or more megabytes. No wonder browsing the web is so slow.

The authors of web pages are partly to blame and some people use images that are unnecessarily large. They thoughtlessly post images that are 2MB or more when a 0.2MB image would be adequate.

However, the blame is not entirely caused by the author posting big and often irrelevant photos with articles. A lot of the bloat is beyond our control because it is the content management system.

I generally try to keep the content as lightweight as possible, with small images optimised for the web. The total size of the text and images is often under 200k for many articles posted on RAW Computing, RAW Apps and RAW Mac, yet the pages end up being sometimes 10 times larger.

Each site uses a different content management system and RAW Computing is WordPress. A typical page is around 2.5MB, but remember that only 0.2MB of that is actually my content and the rest, 2.3MB is added by wordPress.

RAW Apps uses Joomla and the pages are lighter, with typical sizes of around 1.9MB. The best is RAW Mac, which uses Drupal, and pages are around 1.3MB.

WordPress is bloated and there isn't a lot that can be done about it. Plugins make matters worse by adding to the bloat, and perhaps there are some I could live without, but it is hard to see it knocking off a full megabyte to get down to the level of Drupal pages.

Like the author of the article, I dislike web page bloat, but there is only so much I can do to combat it.