Website size

[Roly]

My website is 21KB large, and I try to keep it small as possible. How small are your websites, and do you believe that making your website small in file size is worth it?

[Melooon]

Ah this is a good topic!

Its definitely cool that your site is so small (Plus the design is great). I would like to see more sites like this. My main website is 1.04GB, BUT I do believe in compressing and keeping file sizes as small as possible (I just have A LOT of files).

[Neonriser]

My website's size is 1.05 MB. That's pretty small. The biggest file in the site is the background image. If I were to reduce its size, I would use a marble tileset instead.

I believe that a website should be small enough to run on most computers. Not all computers run fast, and it would be unfair if the information people want or need would take around forever to load! That's why we design our sites to suit people of various levels of patience!

[Obspogon]

Mine is currently 3 MB, mostly because it's technically 2 sites (main site and blog). I try to use TinyPNG to compress the images.

[easy_breezy]

~200 MB for my art site
~100 MB for my personal site

They're loaded with .PNGs and music which is why they're large

[cinni]

2.4GB, but i think that's shared between three sites?

[worldwidewar]

Mine is currently at 11.7 MB with an average bloat score of 0.15.

[GeckoF]

As of the date of writing this, my website, counting all the hidden pages, is 17.7MB. There are images that I have not yet fully compressed due to laziness.

[brisray]

The size on disk doesn't really matter. Mine is 18.9Gb but that's hundreds of pages and hopefully no one is ever going to ask for it all at once. Now and then I get site scrapers that do, but they're rare.

Optimizing everything really is important. There's plenty of other sites to go to if a particular site takes more than a minute to fully load or at least enough to be useable. None of our sites are worth skipping though! Here's what I do:

All the images are optimized. It's surprising how bad an image has to be before it looks awful on a website. A printer would just laugh at you if you gave them web optimized images.

The JavaScript and CSS files are minified. I tried to do that with the HTML files as well but some of them didn't display properly the last time I tried that.

After that, because I run my own little server there's some techy stuff that can be done but one of the biggest impacts was enabling GZip. My server GZips everything before it's sent. There's a tradeoff doing that and the browser unpacking the files and the time taken to actually transmit them, but it's usually worth it.

I've run loads of different tests against the server and the pages it serves. I think it's impossible to pass every test, and it's taken a while to get everything more or less right but the server is about as secure as I can make it without becoming unusable and the average page loads in less than a second and a half.

If anyone is interested, here's a list of tests I run against the computer - https://brisray.com/web/utilities.htm

[Cele]

My 5 websites together are 324.91 MB

[SilkSkull]

This topic has me thinking, what are some ways I could make my site smaller?

[brisray]

I was wrong! Yes, I know! I was shocked myself when I realized it. Size does matter!

I forgot why I started hosting my own sites in the first place. The site was first hosted by Freeserve in June 1999. By October, I had used all 15Mb of space they gave. The site was split between them and Lycos Tripod who offered 20Mb of space. In May 2000, I'd filled all 35 Mb of space on both hosts and moved part of the site to Bravepages.

In October 2000, Tripod increased the user space to 100Mb, but by 2003 I was using 8 free hosts and the sites were getting out of hand. The hosts were also changing, too many ads, some were pig slow and others started using iframes that completely screwed up the site navigation. That June I made my first server and started bringing the site pages back together. By 2006, the only thing left on the free hosts I used was a redirect to my own server.

[/home/user/]

I also wanted to add to this topic the fact that there's little mini-communities of people who have homepages with a certain small file size.

For example, the 1MB Club, the 512kB club, the 250kB club, or the 1kB club.

[debleb]

mine is 112.35 MB. it's probably wayy bigger than it has to be, i just haven't really compressed any of my images... if i did it'd be a lot smaller haha!

[PurpleHello98]

~90 MB I believe, and most of that is taken up by photos from my gallery and a couple of other pages. Nowadays, I compress all my photos to at largest a megabyte, but I didn't used to. Also, I have quite a few GIFs that I've uploaded, though I don't use them all, and a tonne of buttons and blinkies for my button and blinkie archives. Though besides those two pages and my photo gallery, plus maybe another outlier or two, each page averages somewhere under a megabyte, so I don't believe my site is bloated or anything.