[HN Gopher] Two Years and over 700 Websites Later
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       Two Years and over 700 Websites Later
        
       Author : bradley_taunt
       Score  : 110 points
       Date   : 2022-07-18 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (1mb.club)
 (TXT) w3m dump (1mb.club)
        
       | freediver wrote:
       | You may want to consider dropping the criteria to 64k (if it
       | can't fit in a RAM of c-64, it is bloated!). There are sites in
       | your index like:
       | 
       | https://www.pe-we.com/mengenal-kelebihan-dan-kekurangan-asur...
       | 
       | that look like content marketing blogs also running google
       | anayltics. Not sure if that was in the spirit of the project.
        
         | vanderZwan wrote:
         | I think arguably it was, if we assume we want to target the
         | worst offenders, which are exactly those types of webpage.
         | 
         | I'm sure there are other list sites for the truly "spartan web"
        
       | peanut_worm wrote:
       | > Total size of all member websites combined: 169.4 MB
       | 
       | Apparently that is comparable to a single page load of digital
       | ocean's blog
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32076634
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | Did you try loading https://www.digitalocean.com/blog yourself
         | and measure it? I just did, and saw it pulled down 4.28MB worth
         | of stuff, which is way too high for a blog, but nowhere close
         | to 169MB. Maybe there was a bug and they fixed it quickly?
        
           | hombre_fatal wrote:
           | If I load it in Safari and scroll to the bottom, it reports
           | 27MB transferred with a 110MB total (decompressed) payload.
           | 
           | Looks like an error since most of the transfer is large JSON
           | files that seem to be duplications of all of the content on
           | the blog, but I only glanced.
        
       | 300bps wrote:
       | What frameworks are everyone using to achieve small and fast page
       | size?
        
       | nelsonfigueroa wrote:
       | Similarly, there's also https://512kb.club/
        
       | harryvederci wrote:
       | Proud member[0] of the 250kb club here, 1mb is bloat! :-D
       | 
       | [0]https://250kb.club/withoutdistractions-com-cv/
        
       | 8organicbits wrote:
       | A quick check on pagespeed[1] gives me great performance numbers.
       | Here is largest contentful paint (desktop):
       | 
       | www.google.com 4.3 seconds (yikes...)
       | 
       | 1mb.club 1.2 seconds
       | 
       | (edit)
       | 
       | news.ycombinator.com 0.7 seconds
       | 
       | t0.vc 0.2 seconds
       | 
       | tutor.0b.ee 0.3 seconds
       | 
       | [1] https://pagespeed.web.dev/
        
       | frontrowseat wrote:
       | My next side project, this gave me the goal/hope to keep it under
       | 1mb just to be in this club! The internet is too bloated these
       | days, and I swipe away if it takes even a few seconds to load a
       | webpage. We can all do a little better for our users
        
         | xigoi wrote:
         | 1MB is a low bar. Depending on what kind of project it is, you
         | can go for way less.
        
         | denysvitali wrote:
         | <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
         | href="https://thebestmotherfucking.website/main.css">
         | 
         | And you're done :)
        
       | oefrha wrote:
       | 1MB pages are _performance-oriented_ now. Apparently this isn't a
       | parody.
       | 
       | https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm:
       | 
       | > Today's egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow's typical
       | page, and next year's elegantly slim design.
        
         | coffeeblack wrote:
         | I remember 100kB as the upper limit for pages, but that was a
         | time when internet connections were measured in kbps. So 1MB
         | sounds reasonable.
        
         | _Algernon_ wrote:
         | >I shouldn't need sled dogs and pemmican to navigate your
         | visual design.
         | 
         | This was great. Thank you!
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | As speeds get higher the amount of data that can "slip in"
         | during the expected latency gets larger and larger. If your
         | round-trip latency is 400 ms or whatever, why not have 1MB as
         | your page if that comfortably fits into that latency?
        
           | oefrha wrote:
           | Complex web apps aside, the average page today doesn't have
           | more information than five years ago. There's nothing useful
           | to slip in.
        
           | xigoi wrote:
           | You know mobile data is a thing?
        
       | whoibrar wrote:
       | Glad to see this project grow, made my first pull request here :)
       | 
       | Occasionally, I would go there and checkout random peoples blogs
       | and its surprisingly how much great it can be. Some sites look
       | good and are surprisingly fast. I love this collection.
        
       | philliphaydon wrote:
       | I just scrolled the list and saw craigslist.org, visited it, and
       | its 2.3mb?
       | 
       | Aren't the sites meant to be under 1mb?
        
         | Minor49er wrote:
         | When you submit a site, you also provide its Pingdom results
         | from this link, which may be different from the in-browser
         | experience:
         | 
         | https://tools.pingdom.com/
        
       | tambourine_man wrote:
       | For folks who started web dev in the 90s, with 9600 and 1440kbps
       | modems, 1mb seems way too much.
       | 
       | Probably not always accomplishable with the high res hero imagens
       | and videos we need these days, but we should strive for a web
       | that's instant. There's no reason we should be waiting for a page
       | to download and render with the bandwidth and hardware available
       | today.
        
         | jl6 wrote:
         | A page with a big image should still be able to quickly load
         | the important parts (text and layout) and then have the big
         | image finish loading in parallel.
        
           | chubot wrote:
           | 1 MB is even too big for an image. Most 1 MB images won't
           | suffer quality loss when viewed on typical devices when they
           | are 100 KB or even 60 KB.
           | 
           | And they should definitely be minimized for mobile devices
           | 
           | I'd say that the only way a single web page should be 1 MB is
           | if it has 10 or more images, which of course can be useful.
        
             | hypertele-Xii wrote:
             | > typical devices
             | 
             | If you need to design for today, that's fine.
             | 
             | If you're designing for the future, well, already pushing
             | 4K. Your "looks just fine on most devices" image is gonna
             | look like an eye-squintingly tiny compressed-to-hell JPEG
             | from 1992 in a decade or two.
             | 
             | Think about music. "Sounds good on most devices (earbuds at
             | the time)" caused an entire generation of music to be mixed
             | to shit. You expect everyone to remaster?
             | 
             | My own website doesn't qualify because I have gallery pages
             | with multiple 1MB works of art. I hope my works can be
             | appreciated in the future, on better devices. If that
             | excludes me from a tiny ring of web designers essentially
             | running an ad hoc demoscene competition for who can make
             | the prettiest page in 1MB, so be it.
        
             | bombcar wrote:
             | The number of massive 5+ MB images I've been able to shave
             | down tremendously by doing no more than using
             | https://tinypng.com is absolutely frightening ...
        
               | vanderZwan wrote:
               | Were all of those images transparent? As in, did they
               | even _need_ to be PNGs?
        
               | bombcar wrote:
               | Many were JPGs (the "site" is unfortunately named based
               | on originally being used for PNG mainly) - but yes, many
               | were not transparent but were deemed to need to be PNG
               | because it is "better".
               | 
               | Made even more headway on some of the ones we could
               | control by using SVG instead (images that are basically
               | text shouldn't be PNG _or_ JPG).
        
           | tambourine_man wrote:
           | Exactly
        
         | chubot wrote:
         | Yeah I thought that was 1 MB per SITE, but it's 1 MB per PAGE
         | which is WAY too big! I don't want to load that on my phone
         | 
         | I just checked and my home page is 3,575 bytes, which is 280x
         | smaller than 1 MB:                   $ curl
         | https://www.oilshell.org | wc --bytes         3575
         | 
         | The longest article on the site is ~5200 words, and less than
         | 57KB, or 17.6x smaller:                   $ curl
         | 'http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html' | wc
         | --bytes         56672
         | 
         | http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html
        
           | pSYoniK wrote:
           | neat command! my homepage works out to 3,121 bytes and the
           | longest article is 21,164. Never knew it's that small..
        
           | speedgoose wrote:
           | I just did a fast.com speed test on my phone with 2 bars out
           | of 4 of 5G and I have 400 Mbps.
        
             | rustyminnow wrote:
             | Neat! I just did a fast.com speed test with 3/4 bars of 4G
             | and got 60 Mbps!
             | 
             | I didn't do a speed test, but I spent the weekend in an
             | area where I was getting 1 bar and probably 5 Mbps if that.
             | 
             | 5G coverage even when poor, is optimal conditions - not
             | baseline.
        
               | speedgoose wrote:
               | The future is exciting (and warm)!
        
           | hdbdhzuwb wrote:
           | That is just counting the markup you deliver for those
           | requests, not your style and JS bundles, which I don't think
           | is the spirit of the post.
        
             | notriddle wrote:
             | Or images. On pages like https://bors.tech and
             | https://foodpartners.us the "bloat" is all images. The
             | images are bigger than they were in the 1990's because they
             | look better, even if you don't think they communicate more
             | "information" people may still want them.
        
         | nine_k wrote:
         | I suppose that most of the time the culprits are not
         | excessively heavyweight assets.
         | 
         | Number one culprit is client-side rendering. Don't deploy an
         | SPA where a statically rendered page suffices. Don't delay
         | rendering until your whatever other JS loads. Use fewest
         | trackers of lightest weight.
         | 
         | Somewhere distant second places would be asset download times
         | (CDNs help), TLS handshake times (don't overload your server),
         | complicated CSS that prevents fast rendering, etc.
        
           | DrBazza wrote:
           | Many media websites are now so full of cruft, the actual text
           | of the story is barely a few Kb, and the other multi-Mb
           | assets are videos, video adverts, trackers, javascript cruft,
           | unoptimized css, unomptimized images, "infinite scroll", and
           | god knows what else.
           | 
           | The irony is lost on these companies that if the page doesn't
           | load quickly enough I and many other people navigate away
           | before half the cruft that pays for the page has loaded....
        
             | cercatrova wrote:
             | You're in the minority. Apparently those types of websites
             | generate much more revenue [0]:
             | 
             |  _I spent 3ish years making these kinds of websites
             | (specifically those click bait-y "Can you name these
             | Canadian snack foods??" quiz sites). They generate _a lot_
             | more revenue. Like more than double.
             | 
             | Digital publishing's main business model is paying as
             | little as possible for 1 click and monetizing that click as
             | much as possible on the other end. The sales "funnel" isn't
             | a funnel here, its just two steps "1. Show link to article
             | . 2. Show ads."
             | 
             | Now if you're an organic heavy site like NFL.com, you get
             | plenty of free clicks just by reposting articles to social
             | media. Its more important to keep your brand strong with a
             | couple of small, highly paid ad units.
             | 
             | But if you're just an average publisher, you gotta
             | literally pay for attention. It turns into a game of
             | spending $1.00 for an ad on
             | Facebook/Tabola/Outbrain/Snap/etc and trying to make $1.30
             | when they land on the page.
             | 
             | Long term bet IMO is still high quality organic content
             | makes more profit, but you can still make a lot with 3-4
             | engineers and average-ish content._
             | 
             | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32133656
        
         | Siilwyn wrote:
         | With proper srcset and sizes attributes, that serve compressed
         | images in a modern image format you'll usually get below 1MB.
        
       | dimmke wrote:
       | I'm really proud that two websites I designed and built are on
       | that list, but especially proud of https://foodpartners.us/ which
       | unlike a lot of the sites isn't a blog but is a full brochure
       | style website for a business that would normally load many MB of
       | crap if built by a normal agency.
        
         | smingo wrote:
         | Elegant.
        
         | tut-urut-utut wrote:
         | Wow. It's great, you have a reason to be proud.
         | 
         | Clean, to the point, light, crazy fast, zero bloat, no external
         | trackers. And it looks nice.
         | 
         | The only thing I don't like are the banners that waste precious
         | vertical space when seen on a 14" laptop, but can't blame you
         | for that, given how prevalent it is nowadays.
        
           | dimmke wrote:
           | There is one external tracker - Google Analytics. But blocked
           | obvs if you use uBlock etc...
           | 
           | I also designed and built this site in 2016 - over half a
           | decade ago and it still looks and feels modern. It's an
           | interesting look at how web design trends have slowed down
           | from how things went from 2000-2010 to 2014-Present.
        
         | me_smith wrote:
         | Nice website! Light and concise.
         | 
         | This is probably a me problem but I read "Southeast" as
         | Southeast Asia. Not the Southeast region of the U.S. I kept
         | scrolling down and got confused for a second while it hit me
         | what "Southeast" actually meant.
         | 
         | Edit: thinking about it a little more, it might be because I
         | live on the west coast and think of Southeast Asia food more
         | than Southeast US food.
        
         | drewzero1 wrote:
         | I'm impressed by how 'normal'/modern some of these sites
         | (including the Food Partners one) look for how small they are!
         | My sites are small, but they also look like they were made in
         | 2000.
        
         | frittata wrote:
         | Very nice. Is it wordpress?
        
           | dimmke wrote:
           | Yes
        
         | gadders wrote:
         | Snappy website.
         | 
         | I also find it amazing to read about businesses that I had no
         | idea existed.
        
         | sonofhans wrote:
         | You should be proud! That's an excellent website. It's clear,
         | usable, attractive, light, fast, informative, and obvious. A
         | wild outlier, in other words :)
        
           | enraged_camel wrote:
           | I like the clean design, but the marketing copy could use
           | work. For example, "We're the leading southeast new business
           | specialists" doesn't mean a lot, and also has a typo (region
           | names should be capitalized).
        
             | dimmke wrote:
             | Fixed that, thanks!
        
       | rozenmd wrote:
       | I shipped a ~8KiB status page app last week, it's still early
       | days, but even with the features I have planned I doubt the size
       | will be above 10KiB.
       | 
       | With frameworks like Remix it's easier than ever to write React
       | and ship pure HTML/CSS.
        
       | bob1029 wrote:
       | I've been making complex biz admin websites for a few years now
       | that fit in under 20kb (uncompressed) by cheating a little bit
       | with web sockets and js eval. Blazor server-side is a pretty good
       | approximation for what my technique looks like today.
       | 
       | These websites are not the most accessible if we are factoring in
       | network and platform concerns. But, they are by far some of the
       | fastest (non-static) web experiences I have ever been responsible
       | for. For employees in the same state as our datacenter, "instant"
       | is really the best way to describe most interactions. We also use
       | things like in-process SQLite for all of our persistence, so
       | latency between button click & updated DOM is about as low as you
       | could ever hope for.
       | 
       | I think having lightweight & _fast_ web experiences is the key to
       | building a successful technology business. When your customers  &
       | employees have to wait _seconds_ for each interaction to  "come
       | back", they are going to have way more time to think about
       | competitors and spending their time/money/attention elsewhere.
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-18 23:01 UTC)