Is 120 kb too big for a website?

[tnrstudios]

My frontpage for my website is 120 kb.

Is that too large?

[JR]

i wouldnt say so....

if you calculate the times for download on both 56k and 600k it will tell you how long it will take. For this calculation i am going on 56k downloads at 4kb/sec and 600k at 70kb/sec

therefore it will take
56k about 30 seconds to download (what do you expect)
600k about 2 seconds to download

[skrlin]

Nah.

[smoseley]

120 KB is pretty big for a web page, including graphics. Even for a page with some flash on it.

It would take approx. 21 seconds at 56k.

There's no need for so much content, though. You can get a beautiful page in about 5-10k of HTML, with no more than 20k of graphics, plus maybe a 10k photo, totalling 35 - 40k.

[TheGAME1264]

transio's right. 35-40K (at most 50 K) is plenty for a website's front page. If done properly, a very simple and attractive page can be created using nothing but HTML, CSS, and maybe one image that will only take up about 10-15 K of space.

[splufdaddy]

When I was looking for guidelines on how large my homepage should be, I looked around at other sites, to see their size. I used a very complicated tool: the "save as webpage" feature in IE. This tool actually has a lot of uses I have come to find out. It downloads the html page, and then all js, css and image files into a folder. By checking the size of the html page and folder, you can see how large different website's homepages are. I believe the average I was finding was around 80k or so. I mainly checked news sites like CNN and such.

[iphong]

Can not say that is too big! it depends on what site he designs for. For a large site with a lot of content he needs to put in the frontpage so 120 k is not so big.
Big for personal page that is very big!!! if he designs for his personal page so i agree 120 kb is very big, though!
try to use less images unless you really need it. And content shouldnot be too long in one page. Compress the images as small as possible to save space. Download time is most important for a webpage.

[TheGAME1264]

There isn't that much content that would necessitate being on the front page of a website though, and if there is, the user should be given the option to download portions that are relevant to him/her or to skip portions (e.g. skip the intro of a flash site.)

[smoseley]

If you look at his page, it doesn't exude a "120k" image. It's only that large because he's got several graphics in the range of 10k + that he uses in his navigation and as buttons. If unnecessary images were replaced with HTML elements and the rest compressed better, he could easily get a comparable site for about 50k.

[StopDrop&Roll]

If you're looking for a straight forward answer, 120k is big.

Just imagine waiting for 120k to finish loading if you were using a dial-up connection. Most of the members on these forums probably use some form of broadband, don't forget about the millions who don't.

Hope this helps.