Kevin Quirk has started the 512KB club, a list of websites that are under 512 kilobytes in size. It’s a counter to the massively bloated web. There are real costs attached to bloated websites in terms of server, bandwidth and thus energy usage. There are lots of things that can be optimised by lowering the complexity of a website. Low-Tech Magazine has a cool website looking to radically reduce the energy used to provide it. Part of such optimisation is the basic size of the page loaded. And that is what the 512KB club focuses on.
My site isn’t minimalist, one reason being I run WordPress so every page you see here is dynamically rendered each time you look at it. But still, reducing a site’s footprint has been a side interest, as I’m curious about the various dimensions and potential actions for ‘greening’ a website that also provide a better experience to the reader and lower hosting requirements.
At GT Metrix you can analyse your website’s behaviour, and have a look at e.g. its size. My site came in at 980KB about double the limit for the 512KB book club (the mentioned Low Tech magazine comes in at 470KB). Going through the list of files making up that almost 1MB, I noticed that just 2 image files were the main culprits. All it took was optimising those two images (the header image, and a sidebar image), reducing both of them by over 90%. That alone more than halved the size of my site to 487KB.
Image file size optimisation should probably be at the top of my list going forward.
@ton Very interesting post, thanks for sharing! Image optimization is also something my site (hosted via Micro.blog) could benefit from greatly. Will look in to optimizing the performance a bit.
@roelwillems And note to self, not embedding a YouTube video also helps performance and the privacy of visitors.
In reply to https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/11/the-512kb-club/.
But, do you remember the 5K (!) Awards? https://alistapart.com/article/5k/
Funny, the other day I found https://1mb.club/ which is trying to address the same issue, albeit at twice the size! I was pleased to find my own (wordpress-based) site is fairly light, partly thanks to lazy loading images.
@ton this might be a dumb question but is the 512kb goal just for my home page (or any given page in my site), or for the packaged site as a whole?
[site owner/author here] It’s not really a goal as such, but rather a mindset. The whole 512 thing is just a way to easily measure that mindset.
To be included, your homepage must be less than 512KB. Rationale being that all the JS/CSS/etc is going to be loaded on your homepage, so it’s a good representative look at what your website measures. Obviously if you embed a YouTube video, or massive image into a blog post, that will ruin the 512KB thing for that post. but it’s hopefully not indicative of your entire site.
Hope that makes sense?
And now there is 10 KB Club too! => https://10kbclub.com/