Let me start this post off by prefacing that i’m not counting images here. I’m talking about pure HTML/CSS/JS or whatever bullshit frameworks a site might use.

In today’s world most websites are simply bloated, no way around it. But what exactly am I talking about here? These days, most sites are 5-10-20MiB. But why is this? It would be simple to blame it onto soydevs, but often multiple megabyte’s of difference are ads, trackers and junk being loaded in.

Right off the bat, you might be wondering; “What the hell does 25 KiB even mean?” Well, think of it like this: it’s roughly the size of a small text file on your computer, the kind that takes up almost no space. Hell, a simple photo you snap with your phone is many times larger than that. So, when I say my website is 25 KiB, it’s like I’ve squeezed all the info into that tiny text file, without any of the bloat and unnecessary garbage. Pretty neat, right?

I thought size doesn’t matter?

In other cases, it might be more dependent on how you use what you have, rather than what you have but that certainly isn’t the case here. Less is more when it comes to websites, especially when it’s all loaded up with bullshit that have no use to you.

Having a big website loaded with frameworks and fancy effects might be impressive, but it’s a huge pain in the ass when I want to load it on a device with a slow network speed and or a slow device. And don’t get me wrong, a man can certainly appreciate a well designed website with bells and whistles, but more often than not these are bells and whistles that make the site annoying, difficult and slugish to navigate. What’s wrong with putting whatever content you have on a simple site, like the one you’re currently looking at. I can bet you’re not missing the slow loading times, pop-ups, or unnecessary animations, and whatever else that often plague the modern web. A streamlined, efficient site respects your time, delivering the essence of the content without any added bullshit. Shoving all that crap onto a website is like trying to drink from a fire hose. You want to read the content, not get blasted by unnecessary animations and side shows, or whatever else they decide you want.

Most website’s are simply so cluttered with added “features” that are ruining your experience. I can’t tell you how often I’ve faced popups, info being crammed in small areas, and I’m sure you can imagine plenty more. There is nothing wrong with a minimal site like this; I would way rather consume what I’m interested in on sites like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ or https://news.ycombinator.com/news. It’s simple, I can get what I’m looking for without being served 10MiB of bullshit I simply do not care about. My entire site takes ~25 KiB (might be more when you’re reading this), you simply cannot convince me that you need a 5MiB+ site just to serve me what I’m looking for.

To put this into perspective; my 25 KiB website is 0.25% the size of a 10MiB webpage. Another way of looking at it is that my entire website is about 400 times smaller than a 10MiB page. And this is just comparing my entire site to a 10MiB page. Hopefully that puts into perspective how ridiculously bloated some sites are, and how crammed they are with “features” that you simply do not care about. Are you missing something from my site? If i were to bet you’re not; you wanted to read this post and are just doing so. I’m not serving you trackers, ads, unnecessary JS, and you’re not missing them! Who would’ve thought eh?

Now if i were to compare pages this is a way bigger difference, and its more logical to compare page size rather than the whole site. The average size of a page on my site is about 5KiB, all in. This would mean my page is about 0.05% the size compared to a 10MiB one. That means my page is 2000 times smaller! This is a shit ton.

You probably know one of those slugish sites i’m talking about, but if you don’t you could simply google any recipe and get the gist of what I’m talking about on the first few websites. Can you imagine how much nicer your experience would be if the all websites were snappy and quick loading without pushing info you don’t care about? If you are given the decision between a bloated slugish site, or a nice and snappy minimalist site you are more than likely choosing the minimalist option, and the bigger sites you use often are just that; minimalist. A few examples of this are google, wikipedia, ebay, and you can probably think of a few more. It bugs me that the modern web does not respect the user, and opts to push ads trackers and whatever else bullshit they call features in your face. There is nothing wrong with a simple website, and it’s not even an issue for nerds to complain about, but it’s a true issue on the modern web, especially for people with slower devices and network speeds. 20MiB Is a shit ton for some people when it’s all fairy dust.

I’m also sure you’ve had the displeasure of using one of these sites on your mobile device and have been unable to navigate it. This is an issue that has been happing and bugging me for a while now. You’re telling me you learnt your craft for years and aren’t capable of serving your site on a mobile device? It just proves that under the surface of it all they don’t care about your experience. They want to impress you, and shove as much ads and trackers down your throat. This behavior doesn’t stop at websites, but that’s another rant for another day.

To put it shortly; it’s simply a much nicer experience navigating and reading a minimalist site like this, compared to something that has all these unnecessary additions made to it. It’s snappy, works and respects your time. It doesn’t attempt to please you; it just pleases you and doesn’t treat you like a toddler.

So how did i do it?

Here’s the kicker; it wasn’t hard at all. In fact, it would be more difficult for me to serve you a bloated site. I’ve used the hugo site generator with the lugo theme. All i had to do was make a simple index.html file with some hugo variables and give it a stylesheet i enjoy. I didn’t even pay mind to what i was doing; i simply did what i wanted and ended up with a average page-size around 5KiB. Let me once again attempt to put this into perspective; imagine i added bells and whistles that would make the size of the average page 100 times bigger. Yes, 100 times! Now that’s a shit ton right? What could i possible add to make it 100 times bigger? I simply wouldn’t even know. But if I were to do this, my site would only be ~1/10th of a single MiB. And most pages are still 5, 10, 20 times bigger than even that! It’s absolutely bonkers.