How and when did I get to the point where I would consider a page weight of 4 MB on a large page and 500 KB on a small page normal?
This isn’t just a well-earned rant from Manuel. I mean, it *is that, but it’s also packed with practical performance advice.
Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail.
Fire up Reader Mode and read this excellent article informed by data from using a typically slow connection in rural USA today. Two findings are:
- A large fraction of the web is unusable on a bad connection. Even on a good (0% packetloss, no ping spike) dialup connection, some sites won’t load.
- Some sites will use a lot of data!
An excellent tale of performance optimisation …complete with a coda on looking behind the numbers when it comes to analytics data.