Question

I would like to know if there are any web standards regarding web page file-size , how much should the total assets on the page weight considering the users have an average internet connection.

Thanks

Answer 1

There is no standard that limits the size of a web page to a fixed size, so I can’t quote you a source that says “a web page must be no greater than 100kb” as no such source exists.

The size of the page is entirely related to the audience visiting the web page. If you have an “average” audience, you could confidently send 200kb (inclusive of all images, includes and HTML). If you are targeting mobile devices, you will want to make you pages much smaller than this. If you are publishing data for consumption by online services, it may be acceptable to send mega-byte pages.

So this is where as a web-designer you need to use your judgement to decide how big to make the page and to test the speeds in conditions similar to those of your audience.

Asides from page size, there are various things you can do to make your request faster, including HTTP compression and minimising the number of requests (i.e. combine your scripts into a single include, placing script includes at the bottom of your page and so on…

Here is a helpful tool you can use with Firebug inside of Firefox to view the details of each request…

https://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/