Here’s an article on GigaOm from 2012 titled “The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat”. It warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size.
The article itself is 1.8 megabytes long.
The problem with picking any particular size as a threshold is that it encourages us to define deviancy down. Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design.
The author links their tweet saying “your website should not exceed in file size the major works of Russian literature.” At the time, that page on Twitter was 900 KB. Today it is 11 MB.
I work on a full blown web app, and we’re about 11 MB (will look into trimming the fat). We have features like PDF report generation, 2D drawing, and fairly heavy algorithms relevant to our industry. We have thousands of Typescript files, and something like 500k+ lines of code. We also have lots of SVGs for icons, canvas stickers, etc.
So after all that, we’re about the size of an average Twitter/X page. Those are not the same order of magnitude in complexity…
See also The Website Obesity Crisis, nearly a decade ago.
The author links their tweet saying “your website should not exceed in file size the major works of Russian literature.” At the time, that page on Twitter was 900 KB. Today it is 11 MB.
And a lot of that is tracking nonsense.
I work on a full blown web app, and we’re about 11 MB (will look into trimming the fat). We have features like PDF report generation, 2D drawing, and fairly heavy algorithms relevant to our industry. We have thousands of Typescript files, and something like 500k+ lines of code. We also have lots of SVGs for icons, canvas stickers, etc.
So after all that, we’re about the size of an average Twitter/X page. Those are not the same order of magnitude in complexity…
That’s in the slides. It’s one of my favorites: