When talking about page sizes in website creation and design, it basically refers to the downloaded file size of a specific web page. A page size is made up of many files that make up a web page in general. Some of the files that may make up a web page include HTML, CSS, Javascript, image files, gif files, or png files. When all the files that have various sizes are added up, it equals the overall size of a page.
Page sizes are important due to how it affects multiple aspects involving the ranking and performance of a website. For example, load speeds are one factor that is considered by search engines when ranking web pages. Pages that load faster will rank higher on a search engine such as Google rather than a slow-loading one. Mobile searches should also be considered due to how often they are used but also because of how web pages take a longer time to load on mobile devices than on desktops. Web hosting costs is also an important factor to consider because of hosting plans for a website being based on bandwidth of a site. Companies that host sites estimate the size of bandwidth based on factors like page size, number of pages, and number of visitors to a site. The larger the site is in these aspects, the more the cost will be to host the website.
Nowadays when creating websites, page sizes have been steadily increasing over the years. A reason for this may be because of the rising popularity of images on the internet. When visiting websites, most people will not be interested or engaged if there are no appealing images on graphics on the site. Because of the importance of including images and graphics, it makes it essential to try and find a balance between using images and also minimizing the size of a web page.
To get this balance, a few practices should be followed. For example, try to optimize images by compressing or resizing them with various tools so that they don’t slow down the speed of a web page. Avoiding unnecessary custom fonts can help reduce web size and decrease load time. Lastly, minifying resources by removing unused codes, code comments, and/or shorter function names will minimize web size and load time.
Source 1 Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Emily Ramirez 