It's true but not realistic as soon as the website is more than a blog or a static content website. The goal of good web building is to manage to deliver the most value to consumers and the business, and removing what's not needed, and if you add anything, you make it on a performance oriented way. Bloat will always infiltrates itself, so you must clean again and again. I operate e-commerce websites and we went through multiple iterations with two goals in minds : performance ( speed / core vitals / seo ), and developer productivity (I'm basically the only tech guy, and I'm also the CEO managing 10 people). Our current e-commerce stack runs 99% on Phoenix Live view. As our market is only in 1 country (Philippines) we optimize for round trip network with servers the closest possible ( no decent hosting company in the country so we host in HK at datapacket on a beefy dedicated ). Site loads in less than a second, navigation is nearly immediate thanks to live view. We removed most JS trackers as we built our own server side tracking pipeline in Elixir that sends unified data where it's needed ( it took us like 2 days to build ). Since that move Google loves us and we are the top ranking website for our niche in the country on all our key products.
One key thing also is that our target market is wealthy so they enjoy fast data / connection, this helps in terms of determining our target.
Performance is not absolute. It's relative to your product, your market and your location.
A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
31–40 of 356 posts
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
#32Honestly, "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…
Yes, but you should also be mindful that if your site is being viewed by an international audience. A 3 second load time on an average local internet connection can be a minute long load time elsewhere in the world.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
#33That's only doable with a text-centric website. I'm currently finishing a photography section for my personal website, and the gallery pages are several hundred kBs in size, while single photo page is almost 1MB in size (provided you load it on a 28" screen; browser will load smaller variants on smaller screens). Most of that weight is the thumbnails (and almost-full-size photo in the latter case). The only JS I have…
I don't think a site where the key content is large (relative to text) can be expected to deliver that content super fast.
However, quickly loading the bulk of the website and perhaps having a placeholder for the image that has yet to load will still make the site better. I remember seeing something that allowed you to create really blurry placeholders that are tiny, but I can't find it now.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
#34I'm getting 62 bytes over the network and 31.4 kilobytes uncompressed. This page has more content than most pages I visit that are megabytes in size. I wish there was an incentive to go back to smaller web pages in general.
62 bytes is surely not right :) I see your 31.4kb uncompressed, but 9.6kb over the wire.
This comment is 62 bytes and I haven't said anything of value.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
#35That's only doable with a text-centric website. I'm currently finishing a photography section for my personal website, and the gallery pages are several hundred kBs in size, while single photo page is almost 1MB in size (provided you load it on a 28" screen; browser will load smaller variants on smaller screens). Most of that weight is the thumbnails (and almost-full-size photo in the latter case). The only JS I have…
Optimize your images ( use imgix by example or thumbor ( open source version) . Lazy load the images below the fold. For the images above the fold, use 103 Pre Hints headers ( as well as for your css and js). Make sure to inline your critical css . Use http2. Your website won't be much lighter ( picture will be ), but it will be way faster.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
#36Shameless self-promotion: the homepage of plaintextsports.com is 5.2kb today [1], an in-progress WNBA game (4th quarter) is 11.2kb [2], and an extra inning MLB game is 8.8kb [3]. I wasn't aware of this size threshold, and I'm not at this level of optimization, but I'm always pleased to find more evidence of my playful claim that it's the "fastest website in the history of the internet". [1]: https://plaintextsports.c…
I don't watch sports, but I love how this site looks! It reminds me of wttr.in a bit.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
#37I'm getting 62 bytes over the network and 31.4 kilobytes uncompressed. This page has more content than most pages I visit that are megabytes in size. I wish there was an incentive to go back to smaller web pages in general.
The issue, I think, is that the web has become a kind of lowest common denominator app platform, which isn't really what it was originally designed for.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
#38Does this mean your website should also only use HTTP for maximum speed.
No post body was provided.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
#39That's only doable with a text-centric website. I'm currently finishing a photography section for my personal website, and the gallery pages are several hundred kBs in size, while single photo page is almost 1MB in size (provided you load it on a 28" screen; browser will load smaller variants on smaller screens). Most of that weight is the thumbnails (and almost-full-size photo in the latter case). The only JS I have…
Even for media focused websites, this 14KB rule is probably still worth following.
Not for the whole web page, obviously. But you should still be aiming to maximize the impact of that first 14KB.
Ideally you want to deliver enough for the first layout and paint, so that someone can quickly see the frame of the webpage and then you want to minimize the amount of visual changes caused by subsequent data. Ideally the first 14KB should be enough to do the final layout. It might not have any images, but the dimensions of images should he hardcoded in the html or css so the layout won't reflow as the images come in.
Maybe it's worth putting in placeholder colors behind the images that complement the general color scheme of the image and make the load less virtually jarring?
And if 14KB isn't enough for the final layout, the bytes need to be prioritized for "above the fold", to maximize the chance that any layout changes happen off screen where the user hasn't had time to scroll to yet.
This block post is perhaps a little absolutist in it's title. But the advice seems useful for everyone and people shouldn't give up just because there is no way they could possibly make their pages small enough.
Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
#40It's true but not realistic as soon as the website is more than a blog or a static content website. The goal of good web building is to manage to deliver the most value to consumers and the business, and removing what's not needed, and if you add anything, you make it on a performance oriented way. Bloat will always infiltrates itself, so you must clean again and again. I operate e-commerce websites and we went throu…
Hell, my blog is static HTML (mostly) but my most recent post is 40,000 characters in Markdown before adding HTML tags, that's already too big even just as text.