Off course the web is not doomed, but despite the fact that web performance is immensely important (think impact on mobile experience, think impact on search engine ranking, think impact on conversion) the web keeps getting fatter, as witnessed by this graph from mobiforge;
Yup; your average web page now has the same size as the Doom installer. From the original mobiforge article;
Recall that Doom is a multi-level first person shooter that ships with an advanced 3D rendering engine and multiple levels, each comprised of maps, sprites and sound effects. By comparison, 2016’s web struggles to deliver a page of web content in the same size. If that doesn’t give you pause you’re missing something.
There’s some interesting follow-up remarks & hopeful conclusions in the original article, but still, over 2 Megabyte for a web page? Seriously? Think about what that does that do to your bounce-rate, esp. knowing that Google Analytics systematically underestimates bounce rate on slow pages because people leave before even being seen by your favorite webstats solution?
So, you might want to reconsider if you really should:
- push high resolution images to all visitors because your CMO says so (“this hero image does not look nice on my iPad”)
- push custom webfonts just because corporate communications say so (“our corporate identity requires the use of these fonts”)
- use angular.js (or react.js or any other JS client-side framework for that matter) because the CTO says so (“We need MVC and the modularity and testibility are great for developers”)
Because on the web faster is always better and being slower will always cost you in the end, even if you might not (want to) know.