NZ homepage 'frontend' vs 'backend' stats
I’ve just completed a mini audit of the total size of the frontend vs backend requests of the top 75 NZ homepages
The average backend request size is 27.32K (ie. the size of the base html of page) and that equates to an average of 10.65% of total page size. What this means that is 10.65% of the pages is made up of HTML and the other 89.35% of the page is made up with the other content.
What does this mean and why is it important?
A backend request is the base html of the page. The frontend requests are all subsequent requests to load all css, images, javascript etc of the page. As you can see in the above graphic of the download profile of ZoomIn Homepage , you can see that the base HTML is loaded first and then other components of the page (ie. CSS, javascript and images) are loaded after the base HTML
This behaviour is a really important aspect of web compression as the faster you can load the backend html, the faster the rest of your site will start loading and more importantly the faster your users can start using the site.