We also use the Chrome DevTools Protocol to access the Network.loadingFinished events using the RemoteWebDriver. We operate it programmatically with a special WebDriver for Selenium ( Python-flavored in our case).
To use it, the chrome executable runs from command line with the –headless option.
Headless Chromium is a feature of Google’s browser starting on version 59. In order to perform this same task in an automatic way for 1000 sites, we wrote a Python scraper program ( code on GitHub) that uses Selenium and Headless Chrome to calculate the actual total webpage sizes (including dynamic content loaded by JavaScript before the user starts interacting). (Refer to figure 3 in the following section.) With Google Chrome, it’s possible to manually check a webpage’s total-size by starting an Incognito window (or clearing the cache), opening the DevTools Network tab, and loading the webpage. We employed their data from September 2018 to compile the top thousand sites for use in the remainder of this article. Here’s a public preview of the same data, from which you can manually compile the top 50 websites worldwide. Top 1000 websitesĪlexa Top Sites is a web service hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows users to fetch most visited websites (per country or globally) from Alexa’s database. Average Internet Speeds by Country in 2017 by Fastmetrics. So if they’re in China or Brazil (with internet speeds over three times slower than the USA in 2017, according to Fastmetrics) keeping all your webpage sizes under the global average would seem more of a necessity than just a good practice. It also includes increasingly sophisticated JavaScript behavior using frameworks like React and Angular.Īdditionally, the complete access-speed equation should also consider the average Internet speed in your server and user countries.
This includes larger media such as images and video. With broadband speeds increasing every year, publishers have added richer content to their webpages.
Graph of mean Kilobyte totals (Nov 2010 to Aug 2018) by The HTTP Archive This is based on measuring transferSize, which is the weight of the payload of HTML, as well as all of its linked resources (favicon, CSS files, images), once fully loaded (i.e. Recent trendsĪccording to the HTTP Archive, the current average page size of over a million top sites worldwide is around 1,400 KB, which has steadily increased over the years. We’ll look at what’s driving this change and how you can track the size of your own company’s site. We gathered statistics from the top 1000 websites in the world to see how large their pages are. And the more data your webpage needs to download, the longer it will take-particularly on slow mobile connections.īalancing a rich experience with page performance is a difficult tradeoff for many publishers. In fact, Google published data showing that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load.
People today have grown to expect good performance from the web. Webpage size matters because it correlates with how fast users get to your content.