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?
Een snelle website is altijd fijn om te bezoeken. Hoe minder data over de lijn hoeft, hoe fijner de ervaring voor zowel de lezer als de maker. Ton verwijst naar de 512KB club, een initiatief om websites beter te optimaliseren. Zodat ze minder data hoeven te versturen, er minder serverload is en uiteindelijk dus minder energiegebruik. Net als Ton heb ik de voorpagina van deze site geanalyseerd met GT Metrix. Bij mij zijn het vooral de vele scripts die kunnen bijdragen aan een gezonder BMI voor mijn site. Op dit moment is de voorpagina 918 KB. Ik zal eens kritisch moeten kijken of ik echt Google Fonts nodig heb (Ik wist niet eens dat ik het had!) en of ik de Dashicons echt nodig heb. Het meetscript van Matomo zou ik eens kunnen onderzoeken of dat kleiner kan. Afbeeldingen en scripts, dat zijn vaak de grootste boosdoeners. Hoe staat het met het BMI van jouw site?
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And now there is 10 KB Club too! => https://10kbclub.com/