It's always good to be
aware of your file sizes, but reports such as this one tend to give a narrow-minded, fundamentalist picture.
Speed of loading can make a huge difference to your site's popularity. Web designers often indulge themselves with huge graphics that add nothing to a user's experience; this should be avoided.
But total file size isn't the only thing that matters. What really matters is the
responsiveness: how quickly can a visitor begin using the site?
My site
badmintonbible.com has a home page file size of 149 kb. This is actually reduced to 79 kb by compressing the files (I've no idea how this happens, but I'm not complaining!). Purely decorative images account for 57 kb; the rest is only 22 kb (after compression).
Although 79 kb is quite large, the page is very responsive. All decorative images are placed as
CSS backgrounds, which are given a low priority for downloading.
What I'm getting at is this: don't just look at your file sizes; look at your page
responsiveness. If you make your page load in an
efficient way, then you can still splurge on moderately large files.
There are many factors that affect your page responsiveness. Obviously a fast server is helpful (so free web hosting is usually a false economy). The number of
HTTP requests also has an effect. On that very same site, I used to use 8 stylesheets; when I amalgamated them into 1 stylesheet, the responsiveness increased dramatically.
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