Page Size Matters

A few days back, I came across the 512KB club that lists websites whose uncompressed page size is less than 512KB. I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, my page size was just under 400KB but, I wasn’t thrilled with the result. So I decided to cut down even more so, I set out on this adventurous journey of reducing my page size.

I got rid of unwanted JavaScript code and CSS that helped me reduce the page size by 40-50 KB. I wasn’t thrilled enough so, I got back again to debug what was causing the enormous page size. Luckily, I got my answer, and that was my favicon.

A favicon is a small, iconic image that represents your website. My blog’s favicon was taking around 300 KB, due to which every time I requested my blog, the favicon was adding its extra size to the final page size. Upon discovering this issue, I redid my favicon as 32x32 instead of the previous 256x256.

The indicated fix massively improved the page size. Now, my blog’s uncompressed page size is 22.8 KB compared to the original 335.6 KB.

Sometimes the solution to our problem is right in front of us but, we don’t attempt to look at it thereby, wasting time and energy on something different.