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A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

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Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#181
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very small, but it's difficult to scan and painful to read. You could easily use built-in HTML structures to make it actually readable. Your site is, in my opinion, as much a deviation from the old readable web as the over-designed modern sites are. There are lots[1] of small, "class-less" CSS libraries that would keep your site as small (or smaller, with tree-shaking in a modern build system) and it would end u…

The Light Mode toggle pretty much fixed it for me. Dark Mode on this was harsh and difficult to scan/read

I found it easy to read on my phone in light mode, still easy to skim in dark mode but the losing team text is too dark and I have to focus to read it.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#182
post #95

I wonder if anyone has studied the impact of latency on user behavior while considering the impact of user expectations from their typical connection speed. Whenever I see an article about page speed optimization, the assumption is that a user will give up if a page takes too long to load, ans that everyone gives up after X seconds. Usually X is about 7s based on a Nielson article from years and years ago. The thing…

Back in 2006, Amazon found that every 100ms of delay cost them 1% of sales. Google similarly found that a 500ms increase caused search traffic to drop 20%.

These are older anecdotes, but there's no reason to think that people have gotten more patient as internet connections have become high-speed.

https://www.contentkingapp.com/academy/page-speed-resources/...

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#183
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTTPS requires an extra couple of round trips (to do the handshake and exchange keys etc). I don't think the whole thing can be optimised to 1 round trip, unfortunately.

It's possible, but not without security implications: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-0-rtt/

That's only for session resumption though. 0-RTT does not speed up the first visit

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#184
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1MB per photo is fine. It's the content after all. Many sites today will load 10MB of JS and custom font crap alone, just to show a few paragraphs of text. I don't think the point is the size itself, but it's the content vs. bloat ratio.

What's the substitute to not using custom fonts? Or is there a better way to load it? I'm having a hard-time convincing our brand team to defaulting to a system font.

Convince the brand team to pick a couple fallback system fonts and swap the brand font in after it has loaded. You will have a bit of content reshuffling no matter what you do but it's better than the alternative. There are directives to do this in pure CSS but I seem to remember they had some unfortunate implementation bugs so when I did this it was easier to do it in JS.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#185
post #72
post #15

Honestly, "should" is a bit of a click-baity exaggeration. In this day and age where internet speeds are faster and more stable than ever, these kinds of tips should be at the very bottom of your optimisations checklist. I don't care if your website takes 3 seconds to load or 5, what I do care about is that once the website has loaded, my inputs respond as quickly as possible. Reddit for example is total garbage when…

Slightly OT. Speaking of Reddit, I am genuinely curious, do developers of the Android app never test the app or something? I was nagged into installing the app (sorry, I am not as persistent as your typical HN user), but it is actually so much slower than the website, and the content usually just don't load altogether. To be clear, I am on very fast Internet. https://imgur.com/a/hg1gp0a

Reddit is the only service I know of that seems to want to sell you ads, but also goes out of your way to make your life much worse.

If you've got a good amount of bandwidth available you should try Sync. It's an unofficial app but it's built around the ability to prefetch posts and comments. It seems to batch requests in some way, so when you've got a good connection you can get quite a lot of stuff loaded for when your connection dips later (i.e. a train).

That said, there's still more waiting involved than with visiting HN but that's probably because Reddit is much more graphics focused.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fresh load of the page (according to Chrome) is 21.5kB transmitted, 59.1kB uncompressed. That's when loading with nothing cached. The HTML is just 7.9kB, but then the CSS is 2.2kB, JS is 2.3kB, and the favicon is 7.9kB which is a bit funny (but it's of course irrelevant for the actual page). HN could put the CSS and JS into the generated HTML file and still stay under 14kB for the initial load, which then would giv…

Favivon isn't blocking the initial request so it really shouldn't matter. > HN could put the CSS and JS into the generated HTML file and still stay under 14kB At the expense of caching those resources that stay static. With http/2 the benefit of merging into one resource should be negligible anyways.

> With http/2 the benefit of merging into one resource should be negligible anyways.

That's not true, by including them in the HTML you save an extra round trip for requesting them. That's what HTTP2 Push was supposed to solve, but it's being deprecated & removed.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. edit: No, it's not. It deals with TCP window but in no way does it deal with customers conversion, retention rates and all those things.

> in no way does it deal with customers conversion, retention rates and all those things. Those metrics would only be meaningful if the average visitor knew how fast websites and computers can be, and if there are well-known alternatives to your site. Having standards is preferrable to aiming for mediocrity imho. YouTube probably has decent retention rates but it's a bloated pile of UX hell that people use for a lack…

> Those metrics would only be meaningful if the average visitor knew how fast websites and computers can be, and if there are well-known alternatives to your site. Having standards is preferrable to aiming for mediocrity imho.

Of course visitors don't care about commercial and marketing metrics.

They clearly rely on other metrics to decide whether or not visit or stay on a site. And my question still stands: who has numbers or data that show that those 14kb pages perform better in regard to the commercial metrics than heavier pages ? And I mean in the field data, not a synthetic test.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. edit: No, it's not. It deals with TCP window but in no way does it deal with customers conversion, retention rates and all those things.

> in no way does it deal with customers conversion, retention rates and all those things. Those metrics would only be meaningful if the average visitor knew how fast websites and computers can be, and if there are well-known alternatives to your site. Having standards is preferrable to aiming for mediocrity imho. YouTube probably has decent retention rates but it's a bloated pile of UX hell that people use for a lack…

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Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#189
post #55

This made me check my own site[1], the page itself is tiny(3kb). It's the images that get me, and they're svgs. Gotta be something wrong there too, an svg shouldn't be 75kb. edit: nevermind, svg is 13kb, don't know what I was mistaking there. [0] - www.reciped.io

75% of your download time is jQuery and webfonts. You'll need to review your own code to see if jQuery can be eliminated, but the fonts are probably an easier fix. You're serving them locally which is good, but changing to woff2 would help.

Looks like you make a lot of use of the Gibsoni-Italic, so it's probably worth keeping. If it were only here or there, I'd say nix it and rely on font synthesis instead.

If you're really dedicated, you could subset them to eliminate glyphs that you're not using on your website. They're pretty large fonts for just latin characters.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth is extremely carbon intensive. Someone viewing a couple of few 25MP images online could use 20g to 100g of CO2 (depending on compression).

We create 40kg of CO2 a day each through our diet, transport, consumption and other energy use. The idea we need to target our energy burden on Internet routers is absurd.

14 tons per year is pretty high. Most calculators estimate my usage at 6 tons per year.
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