It would be really difficult to know exactly that information for each user. One solution could therefore be to simply try to estimate this cost. 📈
If your users were to pay 25¢ for each page, do you think they would be willing to pay that price to access your website? Personally, I think if this information could be easily available, a lot of people would think twice before going some sites. 🤔 Many of them would probably even avoid going to certain sites or report their visit when they have reliable wifi data.
Fortunately, we can now find out this information using What Does My Site Cost(WDMSC), a tool created by Tim Kadlec. The application joins the information from WebPageTest with the costs to have a 500 MB plan for some countries.
Let's take a look at the page weight of some websites. Instead of choosing popular websites, we will look at some local business websites here from Sherbrooke (Quebec), in Canada (🇨🇦).
Local websites
| Organisation | Page weight (in MB) | WDMSC Cost in USD | WDMSC Cost in CAD | Cost for me in CAD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ville de Sherbrooke | 6.71 | $0.82 | $1.05 | $0.19 |
| Coveo Solutions Inc. | 5.90 | $0.72 | $0.92 | $0.17 |
| Eidos-Sherbrooke | 4.19 | $0.51 | $0.65 | $0.12 |
| Jeux et défis informatiques de Sherbrooke | 3.13 | $0.38 | $0.49 | $0.09 |
| PMCtire | 2.46 | $0.30 | $0.38 | $0.07 |
| Sherweb | 2.18 | $0.27 | $0.35 | $0.06 |
| Axial | 1.94 | $0.24 | $0.31 | $0.06 |
| Sherbrooke Innopole | 1.70 | $0.21 | $0.27 | $0.05 |
| Done Technologies inc. | 1.33 | $0.16 | $0.20 | $0.04 |
| Université de Sherbrooke | 1.26 | $0.15 | $0.19 | $0.04 |
| Classcraft Studios Inc. | 1.00 | $0.12 | $0.15 | $0.03 |
| Benjamin Rancourt | 0.33 | $0.04 | $0.05 | $0.01 |
But how much does the tool estimate Canadians pay for 500 MB of data? With a cross-multiplication, I found the tool uses a value of 75 CAD.
I do not know about you, but it does not match my current 250 MB data plan with Public Mobile, which only cost me 13.80 CAD with taxes. So I added a column where I have calculated what it would cost me personally. With this data in hand, I now plan to stop accessing my local city website from my cellphone!
Average website
According to HTTP Archive, on October 1, 2020 the median site now weighs 2062 KB. According to WDMSC tool, a Canadian user on mobile data would pay 32¢ to access this site. Personally, it would cost me 6¢ on my current plan.
It does not sound like much, but it is only for one website! Doing this little research showed me that we, developers, does not pay enough attention to reducing our page weight. Maybe there should be a better way, like this table, to help us focus more on this aspect? 💰
Are you now going to pay more attention to reducing the weight of your websites? 🌐
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