Has the average web page actually gotten smaller?

A single data point does not make a trend. I think it's highly unlikely that websites are going to get smaller over time, for the simple reason that consumer internet speed/bandwidth gets faster and faster every year.

The real interesting statistic is page load times. If load time is remaining static whilst page sizes are increasing (mostly due to images it seems), then there isn't anything to worry about. Businesses are just keeping their websites within a certain performance envelope and are responding to greater bandwidth as it comes about. (Not to mention JS speed increases)

If on the other hand, websites are growing fatter and page load is getting slower, then there is something counter-intuitive happening. But I doubt it.

I wrote a tool a while back to see whether the number and complexity of DOM elements on webpages has changed over the years - http://domtree.breckyunits.com/

I was surprised to see that at least as far as the HTML is concerned, there hasn't been much change in the past 15 years.

First off, "smaller" is comparing May 2014 to Nov 2013, a short-term effect.

Second:

> The only content type that experienced significant shrinkage was “other”.

> So ruling out third-party content leaves us speculating that either the shrinkage is due to a decrease in use of video (quite possible) or an undocumented change in the testing process (somewhat possible).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

There is some interesting info in the article, but the headline isn't it.

One important thing to consider (and I'm not sure that the survey does) is that a lot of this weight may come from cached sources, such as javascript libraries sourced from CDNs. While more libraries = more total content weight, using common libraries may reduce the weight of the content that actually gets loaded, by eliminating the requirement for redundant compatibility boilerplate and providing DOM manipulation tools that allow much of the page content to be created client-side.

separate shoutout to the HTTP Archive http://httparchive.org/about.php

Never knew this thing existed, but seems like a really nice resource.

suspect it is due to CSS3 and its powerful arsenal which has replaced a lot of js