Top Blogs Bloated Says Pingdom Study

Posted on November 7, 2008

Pingdom analyzed the Top 100 blogs on Technorati and found that many of them have large-sized front pages primarily because of the use of a lot of large photos.

The average total size of the front page was 934 KB.
35% had a front page larger than 1 MB.
26% had a front page smaller than 500 KB.
39% (the largest segment) had a front page between 500 KB and 1 MB.

Pingdom says scripts from widgets and third-party analytics tools are also slowing down the load time of blog homepages. Pingdom notes that blog readers without broadband are really going to suffer as they try to load these large page sizes. They also say blogs may be doing themselves a disservice if they continue to get bigger and bigger.

Since many blogs try to attract a large number of readers, they may be doing themselves a disservice if they let their blog size get too big, which will result in a slow-loading blog. Browser-side caching will help things a bit for frequent readers, but any new or casual visitor will have to load the page in its entirety and some may give up before it is finished or at least get frustrated. (And no one wants frustrated readers.)

On the other hand the blogs with a large number of photographs may be benefitting from having all these images because they bring back readers. Some of the top blogs often have large photographs followed by a paragraph or two of text. A gossip blog may have large photographs of the latest celebrity hijinks and a gadget blog may have a large photograph of the latest Apple product. If the images are what is making the blog more popular then taking them away or shrinking them could actually reduce traffic.