Download Statistics

Remember the old joke that WWW really stands for “World Wide Wait”? Even as more and more people upgrade to speedy cable and DSL modems, file size is a web designer’s constant foe. What takes only a moment to load from your computer’s hard drive could take minutes to travel across the Internet. The more information you put into a web page, the more time it takes to load.

You can judge how big your page is, and therefore how long it’ll take to load, by looking at the status bar at the bottom of the document window. You’ll see download stats that look something like this: 9k/2 sec. This tells you the file size of the page (9k in this instance) and how long it’ll take a visitor to download the page (2 seconds) using a 56 Kbps modem.

The file size and download time takes into account linked files like images, external CSS style sheets, and JavaScript files. This information provides a realistic picture of download speed, since not only does a browser have to download these files, it also has to fetch any files that a page uses (like a photo) from across the Internet.

The file size and download time can be misleading, however. That’s because, if you use the same external files on other pages in your site (for example, if you use a common external style sheet or a logo that appears on each page), your visitors may have already “cached” those files and their browsers don’t need to download the files again (see the box on the next page).

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