So, with an internet connection faster than I could have thought possible in the late 1990s, what’s the score now? A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web.

One of my big goals when I redesigned my personal site last year was to keep it lean and small. As it stands, most pages on this site are < 16kb excluding images.

Still, I do a lot of web development in my job, and it’s hard to convince clients of the value of reducing page weight. All I can really do in those situations is ask the client to determine which third party scripts we absolutely need and try to otherwise be careful about how we use users’ bandwidth.