Designing Websites for Low-Bandwidth Users

As more and Africans are able to connect to the Internet, the disparity in bandwidth between African users and broadband users elsewhere is becoming quite evident. In the following table, Aptivate highlights the lag faced when accessing major news sources from a slow connection.

page load times in seconds

Connection Speed

Developing University

(20 kb/s)

Dial-Up

(56 kb/s)

UK Broadband

(3000 kb/s)

Page

Size

smallest (20 kB)

8

3

0.1

average (250 kB)

100

36

0.7

largest (800 kB)

320

114

2.1

Source: When it comes to websites… small IS beautiful

Optimizing for fast load times can be an enormous task, especially for webmasters used to designing for broadband. Fortunately, Aptivate has put together a great list of guidelines for designing for low-bandwidth users.

  1. No Page Bigger Than 25kB
  2. Reduce Images
  3. Have Good Site Structure
  4. Use Style Sheets
  5. Minimise HTTP Requests
  6. Turn on Compression
  7. Be Cache-able
  8. Avoid PDFs
  9. Put Useful Items First
  10. Show Link Sizes
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About the author: Theresa Carpenter Sondjo is an entrepreneur and web developer. She lives in Cotonou, where she and her partner run People Online. Their mission is simple: la mise en ligne du Bénin. Follow her on Twitter at @theresac.
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