Website size

[Daryl Sun]

How small are your websites, and do you believe that making your website small in file size is worth it?

According to various online website checkers I've used, my blog's homepage is around 140-160 KB in size. However, considering all files on disk, my entire blog is actually around 1.30 MB. It's all plain text files; any images I use are hosted on an image-sharing website.

I like having my blog load quickly, so I do believe it's worth making it as small as possible.

[kiki & ayano]

my websites are collectively around 1.04 GB in size according to neocities, but that's mostly due to running a pokemon website where i have multiple sets of assets containing graphics of every gen 1-2 pokemon (around 251 of them, + 25 extra unown forms) in both their normal and shiny colorations, which are essential to make certain javascript tools on the site work. in particular i host some decently high quality GIFs on the site of some 3D models of said pokemon, and both the normal and shiny folders for those take up ~215 MB on their own. since they're there partially for archival purposes, it was a bad idea to sacrifice the quality for less size. plus, there's a third folder for those 3D model GIFs that breaks them into vertical png spritesheets which is essential for yet another javascript tool, which is yet another 200+ MB. that being said, on no webpage are all of these images loaded at once (usually two at most), and overall the actual pages on the site are still very lightweight. i try to make sure images in my articles are compressed and whatnot. i don't host any media other than images and html/js files in particular. i could probably stand to downsize some of the images used in kiki's journal on our personal website a bit more, though those don't take up much overall space. it would just be nice for those journal entries to load a little faster and i don't think compressing them more would lose much.

- ayano

[Kala]

My website is 29.23 MB and growing! it may be a little big but the site is heavily image littered , i love drawing my own assets and bringing my weird and complicated ideas to life!! I'm obsessed with image compression and i host my art elsewhere so the site is a lot smaller than what it could be. 

[yungwake0]

Mine sits at a quaint 43.48mb, which considering I haven't really thought about file size at all is actually pretty good imo.

[Cobra!]

My website is 378.84 MB... maybe it should go on a diet...

[HalfOfBilly]

I am currently sitting around 940 megabytes, mostly thanks to me archiving videos on that site.

... I probably should look into compression...

[Memory]

Mine is currently around 66MB. Most of that is taken up by the animation breakdown videos, coupled with the fact that I store two versions of every video: a high-res VP9 version and a lower-res (and larger) H.264 version for environments that don't support VP9 (which is really just Safari on iOS). So if you were to browse everything on my website it'd probably be much less than that.

[wetnoodle]

I'm at 546 MB currently, definitely could do a better job compressing images and stuff

[malice]

mine's at 33.71MB, but it used to be about 9MB or so before i started hosting my art on mediafire

i moved all my evanescence graphics to another site, so my main site is now 18.65MB and the other site is 41.59MB

[94673]

just reached the 10 MB milestone a few months ago, probably because of the album covers in the lyrics category. could potentially reupload them smaller but right now I don't feel like that's something I should do Quickly.. on Neocities I have 1GB of space, and I've been working on my website for a little over four years, so it'll be a while before I'm out of space.

[Paprika]

It's not the first time I'm trying to build something online, I've been using blogger, tumblr, write.as, etc but never got the proper feeling. It's about comics ans personal stuff so there's a ton of pictures. On Blogger I remember hitting the storage limit pretty quick, now I'm downsizing pictures to reduce the weight, as long as you can read the text you don't need a 4k HD picture to see the speck of dust on the page of the comic-book.

It helped me a lot and now my website only weight 68 Mo which is rather impressive for me since I'm relying a lot on pictures. want to keep it under 250 ideally I'll see where it goes in the future but I'm regularly deleting files I don't use, the growth isn't exponential.

I've exported this method on Mastodon so even with auto-deletion posts, I downsize pics and in the end I don't consume a ton of data for the instance storage.

[varve]

Mine is 61Mb now - just increased by ~30Mb yesterday, when I added two more gallery pages containing 120 art scans between them (at web resolution, not print resolution).

That's over both of my sites, but the second site is text only, and holds an entire novel's worth of words. Because it hosts a novel.

Anyhow. The vast majority of the bulk on my website is my art. And I'm good with that.

[mittens]

mine is about 19kb, but it's a VERY unfinished skeleton of a site at the moment- i do want to keep it as small as possible though my internets slow as hell lmao

[Semper]

My main site is 173.5 mb currently, and that is a majority art. I have well over a hundred pieces stored on my server with plans to make several more galleries. I accept that this is just the way of  a visual artist's website, even if I were to compress all my files. I admit I could do more compressing (and make peace with Webp), but as I see it I'm not really breaking the bank in either storage or bandwidth. I consider it a flex that my whole site can fit on a usb key several times over.

I'm also sitting comfortably at 50GB of storage with that Neocities supporter swagger and I cannot imagine filling that up anytime soon unless I get really into hosting HD video.

I'm interested in what @technomage and @Melooon said about how bandwidth works:

If you want your site to load quicker, reducing file sizes blindly is generally not where you want to focus. Clean up your code so the browser doesn't need to work any harder than it needs to, and focus on caching files like your CSS and anything that gets reused across many pages that you can load with JS/iFrames or native HTML solutions. Your browser only has to download these files once, and things load faster... Plus it does, incidentally, have the side-effect of making file sizes smaller too, so... Brought it back around lol

Individual pages can slow down if they have a lot of stuff on them, but that slowdown happens in your visitors browser and hosting the images elsewhere will have no effect (it’ll actually slow it down even more because loading images from multiple domains is a teeeeny bit slower)

It’s better to keep everything in one place no matter how big or small it is

This fascinates me! I didn't know that the browser fighting to parse spaghetti is what can slow down a site's load time. I see this as all the more reason to keep my code clean and well documented.

[Memory]

Currently sitting right under 1 MB. I decided to only upload some assets like site graphics while keeping my artwork on a different image hosting server. I turned my fonts into WOFF and the amount of space it saves is huge! 

I gotta get better with code maintenance, I cleaned up my index page but I know there's a ton of pages that are messy from when I was just getting started and learning how to use different semantic tags. It is interesting seeing how other people manage their space and how big their websites are, I'm not sure if I'll ever reach 1GB for my site, it sounds colossal compared to what I have now.