Within the previous five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has nearly doubled. The average page size is currently a little over 300k, according to WebsiteOptimization.com.
There are a number of optimizations that help with larger page sizes.
To take one, example, server-side compression mechanisms provide a good option to negate some of the problems that accompany larger page size, like higher bandwidth costs, and slower page load times.
If your web server is running Apache, mod_deflate can help. If you’re using IIS, there is a good article about compression settings in IIS here.
As with most optimizations, there is a trade-off. In the case of compression, the trade-off comes in higher CPU utilization. A nice overview of compression can be found here. Even though compression raises CPU usage, optimization is a game of trading what you have to spare to get more of what you need, so if you can spare some CPU cycles, compression is a very smart trade.
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