Over 65% of US online users are on a dial-up connection every day. Although this number is dropping steadily and switching over to high-speed Internet, a clear majority of users will be accessing the Internet through traditional phone lines for quite a while.

As such, web designers need to ensure that web pages can load rapidly regardless of connection type.

Although there is no real tangible means to measure what is acceptable for file size, anywhere between 20-30kb (including all images, content and other media elements) is a suitable target size.

This range covers a majority of dial-up users and all high-speed connections in a reasonable time frame, under 8 seconds.