LEADING INDICATORS OF A FATTER WEBSITE

BY AMI BADANI

In my previous post we uncovered the shockingly similar patterns in growth between human obesity and web obesity. As mentioned, however, website obesity is actually quite useful.

A question on many people’s mind is what is causing your website to get fatter?

We’ve teased out the top five reasons that are contributing to website obesity. 

Reason #1: Content Overload

The average page size has doubled over the last 3 years. Adding content is an upward moving trend, which is hurting desktop performance. The same content pushed to a mobile device will result in even slower performance.  

Reason #2: More High-Resolution Images

On average, the heaviest part of a website is typically the images. In fact, images now account for 62% of an average page’s total size. With the number and size of images increasing to allow for better visual experiences, websites will continue to expand their waistline. 

Reason #3: Personalization drives higher-value transactions

There is no denying that dynamically generated personalized content drives transaction behavior and recommendation engines are the new normal. In fact, 53 percent of consumers make higher-value transactions with retailers who tend to recommend products based on past browsing history. The tradeoff: an increased dependence on personalized content contributes to increased web page size. 

Reason #4: Responsive Design is Complex

With over 18,700 different Android devices and the maintenance required to resize websites for different screens, it’s no wonder responsive design is on the top of people’s priority list. Responsive design allows for flexibility and lower operating overhead, however, adds page complexity and weight to your website, leading to performance problems.

Reason #5: Third Party Code is Increasing

The use of ads, social sharing widgets, analytics and other third-party code has increased dramatically over the years. On average, 40 percent of a website’s code is from third parties. This increase in scripting code is a heavy contributor to slower page load times.

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Not going responsive or not personalizing your website is not a good alternative. Therefore, slimming down your page is hard. A more viable option is to focus on improving the performance of a heavy page with a more intelligent content delivery network that continuously adapts and optimizes based on the application behavior.

If you are interested in seeing how your website has grown over the past year, get in touch here: https://www.instartlogic.com/demo

Stay tuned for the next series of posts on how a bloated website can impact your business and the concrete steps to take to reduce your website weight.