I’ve been slowly winnowing my web site down for years, from dropping colors, to simplifying text, to dropping ads, to cutting out as many photos and images as possible. I hate over-bloated websites, as exemplified by Yahoo!, trying to use the Google landing page as my ideal. There’s a lot to be said by a site that just shows plain text, and as little as possible.

Although I’ve been thinking along the lines of a plain-text internet (or just keeping it simple) for many years, it was Daring Fireball’s coverage ( https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/20/plain-text-sports ) of Plain Text Sports ( https://plaintextsports.com/ ) that crystallized my thoughts on the matter. To that end I’ve started to strip out even more non-essential items that don’t contribute to telling the story, and only add additional content to a web page that doesn’t slows down download and rendering. That means I’ll be writing more text-only posts (such as this one) going forward. When I do use any images, I intend to use as absolutely few as possible (except, perhaps, for the cats) and to make them all as light-weight as possible.

Unfortunately it looks to be a long slog. My site might look light-weight, but the amount of data it transfers is anything but. I wrote this using Chrome on my Lenovo IP Flex 5 Chromebook, so I used Chrome to give me an idea how much is transferred by this page when it’s accessed. I did this by selecting Inspect on the page, then Network to bring up a chart that will plot every element, the amount of time, and the number of bytes. I refreshed the page and discovered that my typical “light” page downloads nearly 5.6 Mb of data, and takes about ten seconds for it to fully download. In my defense it starts to display and render almost immediately, but those two numbers are horrific. What aggravates me is that the majority of that load is courtesy WordPress, not directly from my content. So I need to start looking for ways to trim things down even from WordPress’ bloat.

How to determine the size of a web page — https://globalwarning.blog/determine-web-page-size/