Hacker News Reader

Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Question about these sites: are they 250 KB for the entire site (that is: all the pages, images, assets combined) or 250 KB for just the site’s homepage? Because the former basically rules out any blog with enough content or a couple of images, and the latter seems almost trivial to achieve, maybe even if you have a picture of some sort on that page…

View on HN

Based on the doc:

> Websites listed here are downloaded and analyzed with Phantomas. The total weight is counted and then the size of actual content is measured and shown as a ratio.

> For example: If a website has a total weight of 100kb and 60kb are the documents structure, text, images, videos and so on, then the content ratio is 60%. The rest are extras like CSS, JavaScript and so on. It is hard to say what a good ratio is but my gut feeling is that everything above 20% is pretty good already.

Right, but this doesn't tell me what "total weight" is.

It only loads the URL specified.

Good question. It also means that these sites need to be continuously reviewed, e.g., updating the site with new content may push it over the limit.

From a bit of experimenting, I don't even know what it's counting. I thought it was total transmitted bytes, since the numbers seemed pretty low…but then I checked and danluu's site is like 20 KB on my computer because of Google Analytics but it's listed as 3 (TIL it's five times heavier than my site, though I write much less: https://saagarjha.com/). Anyone know what is going on here? Is it "transferred bytes with JavaScript off", which is a rather strange metric?

The only interpretation that makes sense to me is 250 kB per page with loaded assets.

Whereas interpreting it as the sum of all pages on the site, or only the homepage of the site, neither of those make sense to me at all.

What's the number next to the website?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com