Almost two thirds of blogs too big for slow internet connections

by Dan Leahul, Brand Republic 06-Nov-08, 11:30

LONDON - Three out of four of the most popular blogs on the web have a homepage that is too large for slow internet connections, according to research.

In a survey carried out by internet monitoring firm Pingdom of the top 100 blogs, users with low-level broadband or dial-up internet had to wait between half a minute to nearly three minutes to load most pages, including blogs like the Huffington Post, Gizmodo and TechCrunch.

The survey found that despite great strides in broadband penetration in the UK, there are still many households without a broadband connection.

Ofcom says that more than half of UK homes had the faster broadband connection, or about 16.2m users, at an average speed of 4.6 megabytes per second. On average, internet blogs have about 1MB of data on their homepages.

The largest single contributor to the size is images, making up an average of 61% of the total size. These include images in the blog posts and images used for the design of the blog.

The survey said that since many blogs try to attract a large number of readers, they may be doing themselves a disservice if they allow the size of their blog to get too big, which results in a slow-loading blog.

Sam Nurmi, CEO of Pingdom, said: "Many blogs are clearly counting on readers with a decent broadband connection.

"They are most likely well aware of the size of their blog and have chosen to focus on the more internet-savvy audience which is likely to have access to a good broadband connection."