Thought Shrapnel

It’s been four years since I switched to the Susty theme for my WordPress-powered blog. Not long later, I also redesigned my home page to be less than 1kB (although it’s slightly more than that now).

Micro.blog, which I use to host Thought Shrapnel is terrible in this regard. Using Cloudflare’s URL Scan gave a ‘bytes transferred’ total of 12.24MB, which is 3,000 times larger than the 4.15kB for my home page, and 14 times larger than the 891.28kB (including images) for my WordPress-powered blog.

Minimising the size of your site is is not only a good idea from a sustainability point of view, but having a fast-loading website is just better for user experience and SEO. The extract below explains why having a site that is less than 14KB (compressed) is a good idea from a technical perspective.

Most web servers TCP slow start algorithm starts by sending 10 TCP packets.

The maximum size of a TCP packet is 1500 bytes.

This maximum is not set by the TCP specification, it comes from the ethernet standard

Each TCP packet uses 40 bytes in its header — 16 bytes for IP and an additional 24 bytes for TCP

That leaves 1460 bytes per TCP packet. 10 x 1460 = 14600 bytes or roughly 14kB!

So if you can fit your website — or the critical parts of it — into 14kB, you can save visitors a lot of time — the time it takes for one round trip between them and your website’s server.

Source: endtimes.dev

Image: Markus Spiske