Why Total Page Size Should Not Be Too Big

As computers, mobile devices, and Internet connections have become more powerful over time, websites have also become more dynamic and content-rich. Unfortunately, content-rich web pages can take significantly longer to download than a simpler or well-optimized web page. The overall size of the page has a huge impact on how long the page takes to download. Larger pages take longer for the server to generate, longer for the browser to download over the Internet, and longer for the browser to process and show to visitors than smaller pages.

How to reduce your total page size

Fortunately, there are several strategies for reducing the total page size for a web page:

1. First, pages should either use fewer images, smaller images, or optimize images for different screen sizes.
2. Second, JavaScript and CSS files should be minified to remove extra whitespace and unnecessary characters.
3. Third, using compression can reduce the size of the web page as it is transferred over the Internet, even if compression does not reduce the total size.
4. Finally, effective browser caching can let the browser reuse previously-downloaded assets to show the web page.

Benefits

Reduced bandwidth usage

Reducing the web page’s total size can significantly improve the loading speed of the web page while saving visitors valuable bandwidth usage on home and mobile Internet connections. In addition to saving bandwidth for your users, if your WordPress hosting doesn’t include unlimited bandwidth, it can reduce your account’s bandwidth usage too.

WordPress websites can accomplish better page sizes through plugins for caching and minification, like W3 Total Cache, and image optimization.