Twelve kilobytes

This page is about twelve kilobytes over the wire, most of it the two fonts. There is no framework, no analytics, no consent banner, no chat widget, and nothing that runs before you can read the first sentence. That is not a stunt. It is what happens when nobody adds anything without a reason.

The weight is a decision someone made

Every heavy page got that way one reasonable decision at a time. The framework was reasonable — the team knew it. The analytics were reasonable — someone wanted to know what people read. The font loader was reasonable — the fallback looked wrong for two hundred milliseconds. None of those choices is wrong on its own, and the sum of them is a document that takes four seconds to become useful on a train.

The trick is to treat page weight the way you treat colour: as something you decide once, write down, and then defend. If the budget is fixed, every addition has to displace something, and the conversation changes from can we add this to what is this worth more than.

Where it actually goes

• Fonts, if you let them. Two families and four weights is a comfortable ceiling; every extra weight is another file.
• Images, if you never look at them again after the day you added them.
• Scripts that exist to fix a layout that could have been laid out correctly.

Nothing on that list is exotic. The point is that it is a short list, and a page that stays off it is fast without anyone optimising anything.

The part I got wrong

I spent an afternoon shaving a font subset down and saved four kilobytes. In the same afternoon I left an image on the projects page at its full export size and cost myself three hundred. Attention is the scarce resource, not bytes, and it is very easy to spend the attention on the interesting problem instead of the large one.

Now I check the largest thing first, and only the largest thing. It is duller and it works.