Six megabytes for a thousand words
I opened a few news sites with the network panel running. The numbers were worse than I expected, and most of the weight isn’t the article.
I did this partly out of curiosity and partly because a page had been chugging on my phone and I wanted to know why.
Six sites, one article each, network panel open, cache cleared. The lightest came in at 2.1 MB. The heaviest was just under nine. Every one of them kept loading things for several seconds after the text was already sitting there on screen, which is why the layout jumps around while you’re trying to read.
The article text itself, in every case, was somewhere between fifteen and forty kilobytes.
Where it goes
Roughly, and it was consistent enough across all six to be worth writing down:
- Ads and the plumbing around them, usually more than half the total, spread over dozens of requests to servers the publisher doesn’t run.
- Analytics and consent management, which exists to legally collect the data the ads want.
- Fonts, often a few hundred kilobytes, frequently including weights the page never uses.
- The writing, at somewhere under two percent.
That last one is the number I keep thinking about. On a lot of the web the article is a rounding error inside its own delivery system.
The caveat
None of this makes a small site better journalism. Weight isn’t quality and a fast page can be completely empty. Those sites employ reporters, and I don’t, and the ad machinery I’m complaining about is what pays them.
What struck me wasn’t that the pages were heavy. It’s how much of the weight has nothing to do with either the writing or with funding it, and how much of it looks like stuff nobody has gone back and looked at in years.
For comparison, since it’s only fair: this page is about 20 KB of HTML, one stylesheet, and whatever pictures the post actually needs. That’s not clever engineering. I just didn’t add the other things.