To be fair, 14.4MB of that is images (I don't know why some of them are that large, however). Does their offering specifically have something related to image optimization / scaling (I'm unfamiliar with Netlify)?
We do have image optimization built-in but it won't change images' size (in case you link externally - we don't want to move your cheese) or do anything lossy.
So - we have not resized and chosen optimal formats for those images and we are working on doing it right now :)
But it's not just the blog I linked to above that's slow, it's even the blog post of this very HN post.
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.netlify.com/KdCXA8bB
54 http request (26 of which are JS) just seems kind of nuts for a blog post.
Not trying to make you guys look bad.
But clearly asset merging and image optimization are needed.
But yes, we all agree that we should do a better job of making our website leaner and we do have a bunch of changes planned around that (and we're hiring!).
I compared it to apple.com (since someone mentioned it in a lower comment) and apple.com had noticeable page loads whereas Netlify's blog didn't.
I'm sure the site is fast on a regular connection though.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-2-for-web-developers/
Is YSlow (which warns about too many HTTP requests) still updated? There's been no updates for 3 years here:
See the comparison:
https://www.dareboost.com/en/comparison/598b93730cf2aac95f75...
That's about the same size as _Walden_ by Thoreau. Seems large.