Website and Human Obesity: When Correlation Isn’t Causation

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WEBSITE AND HUMAN OBESITY WHEN CORRELATION ISNT
CAUSATION
BY AMI BADANI
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Obesity everyone knows its bad and its an
epidemic. However, obesity isnt just limited to
weight gain. Like human obesity, websites also
have an obesity problem. Just over the past year,
web pages have become about 25 bigger meaning
the download size of a website is about 1890KB
today versus 1532KB just over a year ago. Take a
look down history lane and youll notice that
websites have more than doubled in size over the
last three years. In fact, websites have grown
more than 150x in size over the past 20 years.
So, what does this have to do with human obesity?
HUMAN OBESITY GROWTH
Lets first take a look at human obesity and its
growth rate over time. Since the 1960s, the rise
in weight gain in the United States has been
steadily increasing, according to the Center for
Disease Control (CDC).  
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WEBSITE OBESITY GROWTH
Put the Super Sized meal aside and look at the
growth rate of websites over time. According to
HTTP archive, the total transfer size of websites
(an indicator of how heavy a website is) has
grown by an average of 5 annually and there are
no signs of website weight slowing down. By late
2017, at this same growth rate, the average page
will be a whopping 3MB.
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Strikingly similar is the slope of the curves. In
fact, if you plot the website obesity growth
rates on top of the human obesity growth rates,
they are almost identical. Quite ironic
considering human obesity and website obesity
have absolutely no correlation to each other.
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Unlike human obesity, however, website obesity is
actually quite useful. By having a fatter
website, the user experience is richer higher
quality images, more content, more personalized,
etc. In fact, every change to your website is
making it larger - the root cause of website
obesity. Larger websites will ultimately slow
down performance and by not prioritizing
performance, the consumer experience will degrade
over time. Therefore, the cost of performance
cannot be ignored. Consumers will shy away from
slow loading websites leading to increased site
abandonment and decreased conversions. So, at the
very least, acknowledge that your website will
have an obesity problem and if left untouched,
your website waistline will continue to expand.
Like everything, moderation and working smarter,
not harder is key. Measure your page size and
take immediate action to improve web performance
with a more intelligent content delivery
network. Stay tuned for the next series of posts
that will shed some light on why your website is
bloated and what you can do about it.  
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