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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

#81

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.

1MB per photo is massive. Its easy to compress photos down to 100KB or less.

Wat.

1MB per photo is tiny when the photo is the content. You need ~100KB for a high quality 512x512 WebP. AVIF will be slightly better but still doesn’t have universal support.

We’ve had 4K (8MP) screens for a decade now and normal DSLRs shoot 25MP so you can zoom in.

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

#83
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…

Mobile data is very inconsistent when in rural areas. The best speed I got in an urban areas was around 800Mbit/s but I have seen speeds in some rural areas closer to 1Mbit/s to 3Mbit/s. That is in the UK, not a 3rd world country.

In my rural unit in the densest area of Seattle, I routinely have to hold my phone slightly to the left or all network requests are a crapshoot. I also often have to force quit the browser just to resume any network requests. If your website requires that much hand holding, most people don’t know how to do it even if they know they need to or want to.

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

#85
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Omg just disabling custom fonts in Firefox speeds up the internet so much!

I wish I could do this without breaking all the obnoxious sites that use fonts for icons. Someone should invent an HTML tag for putting images on a page.

A lot of icon frameworks are moving to SVG embedded on the page. Better usability - compared to the lazy fontawesomes out there.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's sad how we've come to get impressed by this

Sadly it’s likely to only get worse. Google‘s new "helpful content" updates have the SEO world in a frenetic search for unique images, videos, etc. to stuff into articles. If I remember right Google even states that it prefers to see those in content and articles… Further exacerbating the challenge of creating helpful content that loads quickly if you ever want it to get seen

I had to look up what you meant and found Google's blog post:

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co...

Good to hear. But whether Google can achieve it is another thing.

Quotes I like:

"content created primarily for search engine traffic is strongly correlated with content that searchers find unsatisfying."

No shit! I hope some of the websites I've worked on get signaled up the rear end! I've warned site owners not to use too much SEO content, but the forces of copy-cat SEO tactics are stronger than individual developer advice.

"Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't)."

I wish Google had been more plain speaking in the past about this. Better late than never I suppose.

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

#88

Shameless 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…

Fantastic. I’ve finally found a tolerable sports site.

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

#90

That'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…

> That's only doable with a text-centric website

Yeah if you're trying to fit the WHOLE web page into 14kb.

But you can get ALL the text there and have the images load in after. The first time I used a the static site generator Gatsby I was super weirded out by the blurry image that showed up upon first load of an Img. It will quickly resolve into a full quality image, ofc, but the point is a relevant metric is also time to first contentful paint.

Also the JS will load the rest of your pages while you're idling on the first page, so that's nice. It's not just good enough to have lazy-loading content, your strategy will have to change depending on how users use your site. Let's say 99% of people scroll to the right in a circular gallery of pictures. You should only really load pictures to the right.

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