Tracking Page Weight Over Time

[igrigorik]

@paulcalvano

For example, in May 2016 there was an interesting jump in page weight across the top 50 largest pages.The jump on May 1st, 2017 continues to be of interest because it seems to have been triggered by an increased in the largest pages.

I suspect both of those are could be to changes (or faults) in our pipeline:

• HTTP Archive is now powered by Chrome - circa March/May 2016. Have a feeling this can explain the difference: we got different content when fetching with Chrome UA – sadly, UA sniffing is a thing.
• ~May 2017 we moved to Linux agents, which resulted in some hiccups.

/cc @rviscomi @patmeenan for sanity check. That aside…

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@paulcalvano

When viewed on a line chart, it’s interesting to note that on May 1, 2017 the average page weight increased considerably, while the median, 75th percentile and even 85th percentile dropped. The 95th percentile continued to rise, indicating that the recent surge over 3MB was largely a result of 5% of the largest pages…

[snip]

If we step back and look at this as a yearly trend, it seems that since 2016 the page weight growth across some websites has increased at a much slower rate. In fact 50% of sites may have actually managed to reduce their page weight slightly.

And that’s why it’s critical that we look at the full distribution, instead of just looking at averages. Awesome analysis Paul and thanks for digging into this data! Lots more to explore here.