Best Practices:
Ideal Front Page Size
Web Commerce Today, Issue 18, January 15, 1999
You hear the rule of thumb that a front page should be no larger than 50K or less in size. Do the top retailers really take that seriously? Here's a check-up on the "best practices" of some of the best known and successful online retailers.
Studies were conducted between January 10 and 20, 1999 using a Netscape 4.5 browser on a Windows 98 platform and calculating the size of graphics only, not HTML:
|
Bloomingdales http://www.bloomingdales.com/ |
128K |
|
Macy's http://www.macys.com/ |
114K |
|
Disney http://disney.go.com/ |
87K |
|
Eddie Bauer |
82K |
|
Lands' End http://www.landsend.com/ |
74K |
|
iQVC http://www.qvc.com/ |
73K |
|
Spiegel http://www.spiegel.com/spiegel/ |
73K |
|
Compaq http://www.compaq.com/ |
72K |
|
FAO Schwarz http://www.faoschwarz.com/ |
66K |
|
53K |
|
|
L.L. Bean http://www.llbean.com/ |
52K |
|
50K |
|
|
50K |
|
|
Dell http://www.dell.com/ |
46K |
|
Sears http://www.sears.com/ |
42K |
|
Wilson Internet Services |
41K |
|
Wal-Mart http://www.wal-mart.com/ |
38K |
|
BarnesAndNoble.com |
36K |
|
36K |
|
|
OfficeDepot http://www.officedepot.com |
35K |
|
Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/ |
33K |
|
CDNow http://www.cdnow.com/ |
23K |
Take a look and see if you can see a correlation between those retailers that had the largest online sales and those that had less. Certainly Dell, Amazon.com, were among the leaders.
Notice that some of the most serious online retailers were under 40K. BarnesAndNoble.com, which is trying hard to move Amazon.com out of first place as the online book dealer, was neck-and-neck to its competitor.
Look at the apparel sites. One of the fattest is Macy's, who seems to be more concerned about image than sales. The entire first page consists of graphics -- not text at all, and of the first page images, a single animated GIF image weighs in at 70K.. Bloomingdales was at 128K the first time I looked, but their Valentine front page was much less, at 76K. Maybe they learned something. Is the purpose of these sites branding or sales?
But there are some great examples of high quality apparel sites with a much more manageable size. At 50K, Nordstrom included a number of graphics, but had reduced the files size so effectively that the download time was within the "sweet spot." Well done! Even lower, though much more spare in style, was the Gap at 36K.
One of the biggest issues is that high-design sites are generally designed by graphic designers more familiar with print graphics, who haven't yet adapted graphic design to the needs of the Web medium. The other problem is that these graphic artists and designers almost invariably view their site's webpages from a high-speed T1 connection, so they never see the long download delay that their customers have to deal with.
Of course, you hear the inevitable excuses: it really doesn't take that long. Under ideal conditions, perhaps. But you've experienced many days when the Internet was just plain slow. A fast-downloading first page can often make the difference between a shopper stopping in your online store, or clicking off to another friendlier shop. At least the Internet's top retailers seem to think so.