Fashion sites are the heaviest on the web, study finds

The fashion world has taken hits for presenting models some consider too thin. But now, it’s struggling with being too heavy--at least, when it comes to web site design, according to a recent study by Bytelevel Research. In a survey of 80 fashion-focused web sites ranging from those of couture houses such as Versace and Armani that use the web to build brand, to mass merchandisers like JC Penney and Abercrombie & Fitch that actually sell apparel on site, Bytelevel found that the fashion industry builds heavier sites--denser and therefore slower to load–-than most other industries. In efforts to replicate the runway experience and present clothing in a dynamic way online, fashion sites are relying on bandwidth-hogging applications such as Flash that slow down the user experience, Bytelevel found. Of the sites studied, designer Helmut Lang had the most streamlined and fastest-loading home page by far, weighing in at only two kilobytes for HTML text and scripting plus graphics. Mass merchandisers including Abercrombie, J. Crew and JC Penney ranked in the middle, with sites that weighed in at 69, 80 and 85K, respectively; while designer Hugo Boss had the heaviest site surveyed, 646K.

To compete, Bytelevel says fashion sites should weigh no more than 70K. That’s about 20K less than the current average page weight of 89K. “This weight limit is still twice that of Yahoo! but lighter than most fashion sites,” says John Yunker, principal. Developers of fashion sites also must “take off the broadband blinders,” that have caused too many fashion sites to be created for high-speed connection, he adds. “The broadband revolution is taking much longer than people had expected. It could take another five years just for half of all wired households to have high-speed connections. If you want to reach them, you have to meet them halfway.”