21st August 2013, 1 min read

Average Size of Web Pages plus Prediction

Average Size of Web Pages plus Prediction shows an exponential fitting to web-page sizes.

From above article:

As you can see, the 1/2 MB mark was cracked in 2009 and the 1 MB mark was cracked in 2012. Despite the seemingly random fluctuations, an exponential trend is clearly visible. The power 0.3 indicates that the web page sizes doubles about every 2.3 years. Assuming this exponential trend continues we will have these average sizes in the coming years:

2013 – ca. 1600 kb

2014 – ca. 2100 kb

2015 – ca. 2900 kb

So the 2 MB will probably be cracked in 2014 and in 2015 we will already be close to the 3 MB mark. Of course the trend is bound to flat out, but at this point there’s no telling when it will happen.

Data was from Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2008 extrapolated to the years 2014 and 2015 via exponential fitting. Graph in that article is below.

Added 26-Mar-2017: Also see Most of the web really sucks if you have a slow connection by Dan Luu. In a more funny form see The Website Obesity Crisis by Maciej Cegłowski.

Added 23-Jan-2023: Also see Web Almanac: Page Weight 2021 giving below figures.

Added 19-May-2023: Page Weight 2022 says that roughly 75% of all webpages are now delivered in compressed format, i.e., either gzipped or Brotli-compressed.

Also in the year 2022:

The median page (50th percentile) makes 76 requests for desktop page loads, and 70 on mobile page loads.

That's huge!