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Why your website should be under 14kB in size

Having a smaller website makes it load faster — that's not surprising. What is surprising is that a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.

To illustrate this example of bad latency, let's imagine a bunch of oil rig bros have forgotten their dice at home and need to use the excellent (under 14kB) missingdice.com to play Dungeons & Dragons. Satellite internet might seem like a deliberately bad example — I chose it because it illustrates the point and is weird — but for landlubbers latency can get worse than that for lots of reasons: If you make sure the first 14kB of data you send to your visitors can be used to render something useful — for instance some critical CSS, JS and the first few paragraphs of text explaining how to use your app.

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