Average Top 100 Weblog Performance Survey

Website Optimization is announcing survey results of how the top 100 weblogs compare with the 1000 most popular websites. What are the differences in size and performance between these two samples? What conclusions can we draw about advertising use between and within the two surveys? To find out, we updated a survey by Pingdom, an uptime monitoring company based in Sweden, who recently analyzed the top 100 blog home pages listed in Technorati for their size, composition, and web site performance. This article summarizes Pingdom's findings, adds a CSS analysis, compares the top 100 blogs with the top 1000 websites, and offers some advice.

Overall Top 100 Blog Statistics

Pingdom's October 2008 survey found that the average home page of the top 100 weblogs is 934 KB in size, with nearly two-thirds of total page size due to images (61.3%), 17.2% due to scripts, 15.3% due to HTML, and 5.9% from CSS. The average top 100 blog home page had 63 images (including HTML and CSS images) and 9 external scripts. The number of external CSS files was not reported. To update the survey, we tested the number and size of external CSS files for the top 100 blogs.

The Average CSS Profile of the Top 100 Weblogs

We ran a test on the top 100 blogs for external CSS files and total size. The average top 100 blog uses 4 external CSS files (@imports included) with an average total file size of 43.1K (uncompressed). The number of external CSS files ranged from 1 to 18. The total size of CSS ranged from to 0.2K to a whopping 307K. Note that this analysis does not include internal CSS within (X)HTML files. It does include nested CSS files called with @import directives.

Comparison of the Top 100 Weblogs with the Top 1000 Websites

The home page of the average top 100 weblog is three times the size of the average top 1000 home page. The front page of the average top 100 blog is 934K in size (Oct. 2008) while the size of the average top 1000 home page is 312.05K (January 2008). The size of the average top 1000 home page has no doubt grown since early 2008. If you assume the same growth rate year over year of 24.2%, the average home page of the top 1000 web sites would be just over 385K as of December 2008. The top 100 weblog is still more than 2.4 times the size of the average top 1000 web page.

For the full "Average Top 100 Weblog Performance Survey" visit
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-top-100-weblog/

About Web Site Optimization:

Web Site Optimization, LLC provides web site optimization and search engine marketing services that "tune up" web sites for increased usability, conversion rates, traffic, and profitability. For more information visit Website Optimization www.WebsiteOptimization.com