Blog front pages are now large pages of images and scripts rather than the pared-down text pages of old. The average-sized front page is 934KB and 35 per cent are over 1MB, according to researchers who looked at Technorati"s top 100 blogs. Images were the main contributor to front page size - making up 61.3 per cent of total size, next were scripts with 17.2 per cent. Scripts are typically add-on functions to blogs like those which record visitor numbers. The average number of script files on a front page was nine.
These file sizes mean that a surfer with a low-end broadband connection of 256kbits/s would take 33 seconds, at best, to load a blog front page of 1MB. On a dial-up modem this would take 2 minutes 30 seconds. Researchers from Pingdom suggested that bloggers, keen to get as many readers as possible, pay more attention to optimising their front pages for those on slower connections.