3 ms·

So few of these are actually good sites. The majority are text-only portfolios. Go figure they’re a paltry few kB. It feels like the list is pointless, it’s sa

So few of these are actually good sites. The majority are text-only portfolios. Go figure they’re a paltry few kB. It feels like the list is pointless, it’s saying “small sites are small” - instead of showcasing well-optimized sites that you would expect to be quite large. Here’s my submission to usurp first place: <p>lelandfe’s site

raspyberr 5y ago
I do agree with you but I think one of the points being made is that The New York Times is basically a text-only portfolio and sits at 15MB.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  That the majority of that NYT homepage weight is in low-priority video does not lend much credence to it being a text-only site. On an iPhone 12, it's also a 14,000px tall site, chock full of content. The HTML document size alone nearly disqualifies it from being on this list. It feels rather... pointless? to pick on a news organization's homepage for being bloated, and then gesture at some guy's 9kB portfolio saying "see! this is speed!"
  - birksherty 5y ago
    NYT is bloated for a news site. That is the point. Even with just the news text, it is bloated. If simply the html is that big it is bloated. Period.
  - jafitc 5y ago
    do you really need to load 14,000px worth of content with no interaction? What if I just navigate away to the first article? The Nytimes website with the exact same look and functionality could be well under 1MB easily.
emschlr 5y ago
> The majority are text-only portfolios. Yeah... 512 KB is a lot of bytes for text-only website. For text-only sites the threshold should be much lower. Like ten times lower. 50 KB club anyone?
- tiborsaas 5y ago
  64k or 128k would be more interesting, I also think that 512k is very generous.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
> So few of these are actually good sites. The majority are text-only portfolios. Go figure they’re a paltry few kB. I agree. I still think the website with one of the highest content-to-form ratio is gnu.org: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html It makes the reader mode unnecessary - as opposed to the old version that wasn't split into columns so reading was slower: http://web.archive.org/web/20070311064322/https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html http://web.archive.org/web/20070311064322/https://www.gnu.or...
lelandfe 5y ago
I want fastsitesthatdostuff.com. No blogs, no portfolios. Give me sites that actually do things, are quite tidy in size, and are blazing fast. - https://www.webpagetest.org/ https://www.webpagetest.org/ (322kB) - https://gutenberg.org/ https://gutenberg.org/ (298kB) - https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/ (441kB) [chained JS modules means it's still slow however] Any others?
- birksherty 5y ago
  > I want fastsitesthatdostuff.com. No blogs, no portfolios. Give me sites that actually do things, are quite tidy in size, and are blazing fast. You want that, but most sites where people just read are big in many MBs. They are slow. That's the point, not sites doing stuff.
- donohoe 5y ago
  https://webperf.xyz https://webperf.xyz maybe? As a news site Rest of World is fast loading but because of lead image it can exceed 500KB in size depending on article. https://restofworld.org/ https://restofworld.org/
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cuu508 5y ago
  My SaaS landing page (https://healthchecks.io https://healthchecks.io) doesn't do things by itself but it contains screenshots, integration logos, a little bit of JS. It was just over the 512KB threshold, I ran the PNG files through oxipng and got it to qualify :-) https://gtmetrix.com/reports/healthchecks.io/qHMaqFXb/ https://gtmetrix.com/reports/healthchecks.io/qHMaqFXb/
  - somehnguy 5y ago
    You’re responsible for healthchecks.io? I found and started using it a few months ago to monitor some home backup tasks & a couple other simple jobs that I don’t care about unless they stop. Thank you for the wonderful service & documentation. I wasn’t looking forward to setting up monitoring but your service actually made it a pleasure!
boopboopbadoop 5y ago
Just wanted to post and say I enjoyed reading through your website. Very succinct.

raspyberr 5y ago

I do agree with you but I think one of the points being made is that The New York Times is basically a text-only portfolio and sits at 15MB.

lelandfe 5y ago
That the majority of that NYT homepage weight is in low-priority video does not lend much credence to it being a text-only site. On an iPhone 12, it's also a 14,000px tall site, chock full of content. The HTML document size alone nearly disqualifies it from being on this list. It feels rather... pointless? to pick on a news organization's homepage for being bloated, and then gesture at some guy's 9kB portfolio saying "see! this is speed!"
- birksherty 5y ago
  NYT is bloated for a news site. That is the point. Even with just the news text, it is bloated. If simply the html is that big it is bloated. Period.
- jafitc 5y ago
  do you really need to load 14,000px worth of content with no interaction? What if I just navigate away to the first article? The Nytimes website with the exact same look and functionality could be well under 1MB easily.

emschlr 5y ago

> The majority are text-only portfolios. Yeah... 512 KB is a lot of bytes for text-only website. For text-only sites the threshold should be much lower. Like ten times lower. 50 KB club anyone?

tiborsaas 5y ago
64k or 128k would be more interesting, I also think that 512k is very generous.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

> So few of these are actually good sites. The majority are text-only portfolios. Go figure they’re a paltry few kB. I agree. I still think the website with one of the highest content-to-form ratio is gnu.org: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html It makes the reader mode unnecessary - as opposed to the old version that wasn't split into columns so reading was slower: http://web.archive.org/web/20070311064322/https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html http://web.archive.org/web/20070311064322/https://www.gnu.or...

lelandfe 5y ago

I want fastsitesthatdostuff.com. No blogs, no portfolios. Give me sites that actually do things, are quite tidy in size, and are blazing fast. - https://www.webpagetest.org/ https://www.webpagetest.org/ (322kB) - https://gutenberg.org/ https://gutenberg.org/ (298kB) - https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/ (441kB) [chained JS modules means it's still slow however] Any others?

birksherty 5y ago
> I want fastsitesthatdostuff.com. No blogs, no portfolios. Give me sites that actually do things, are quite tidy in size, and are blazing fast. You want that, but most sites where people just read are big in many MBs. They are slow. That's the point, not sites doing stuff.
donohoe 5y ago
https://webperf.xyz https://webperf.xyz maybe? As a news site Rest of World is fast loading but because of lead image it can exceed 500KB in size depending on article. https://restofworld.org/ https://restofworld.org/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cuu508 5y ago
My SaaS landing page (https://healthchecks.io https://healthchecks.io) doesn't do things by itself but it contains screenshots, integration logos, a little bit of JS. It was just over the 512KB threshold, I ran the PNG files through oxipng and got it to qualify :-) https://gtmetrix.com/reports/healthchecks.io/qHMaqFXb/ https://gtmetrix.com/reports/healthchecks.io/qHMaqFXb/
- somehnguy 5y ago
  You’re responsible for healthchecks.io? I found and started using it a few months ago to monitor some home backup tasks & a couple other simple jobs that I don’t care about unless they stop. Thank you for the wonderful service & documentation. I wasn’t looking forward to setting up monitoring but your service actually made it a pleasure!

boopboopbadoop 5y ago

Just wanted to post and say I enjoyed reading through your website. Very succinct.