, 2 min read
Member of 250KB club
Original post is here eklausmeier.goip.de/blog/2024/01-20-member-of-250kb-club.
I am now a member of the 250KB club. See "Proud member":
eklausmeier.goip.de
Proud member of the exclusive 250KB Club!
Added: 2024-01-19 | Last updated: 2024-01-19
eklausmeier.goip.de is a member of the exclusive 250KB Club. The page weighs only 78kb and has a content-to-bloat ratio of 13%.
They are now entitled to add one of those shiny badges to your page. But don't forget, even though I tried to make them as small as possibe, a badge will add some kilobytes to your page weight. A code snipped can be found by clicking on the respective badge.
While the overall size of 78kb, compressed size, is OK, the bloat ratio of 13% is not so good. I.e., 87% is effectively bloat. In my case the major contributing factors are:
- Google fonts, no fault on Google
- JavaScript for Pagefind for having instant search
For example, the post Moved Blog To eklausmeier.goip.de measured with tools.pingdom.com loads in 244ms from Frankfurt and needs 8 requests.
The distribution among content type is as below.
Again, 90% is fonts, script, and CSS, i.e., bloat. Without losing any information, but with losing appearance and slickness I could spare 80%!
Looking at the waterfall diagram one can see that dropping fonts would not lead to any significant faster website. This is because Google is pretty fast serving all those fonts. Similarly, Pagefind's processing can be seen overlapping the other processing, so not adding much waiting.
Though I am also a little guilty in the overall website obesity crisis.
Most of the talk about web performance is similarly technical, involving compression, asynchronous loading, sequencing assets, batching HTTP requests, pipelining, and minification.
All of it obscures a simpler solution.
If you're only going to the corner store, ride a bicycle.
If you're only displaying five sentences of text, use vanilla HTML. Hell, serve a textfile! Then you won't need compression hacks, integral signs, or elaborate Gantt charts of what assets load in what order.
Browsers are really, really good at rendering vanilla HTML.
We have the technology.
Being a member of the 250KB club is not very surprising as I am already a member of the 512KB club, in particular their "green team", i.e., the team with websites smaller than 100kB uncompressed.