I believe this is placing emphasis on entirely the wrong thing.
Page size does not matter. Render time/time 'til functional does.
Stripe.com is 1.2MB fully loaded but is pretty much all non blocking so it feels as fast as a very small site. By the time you've scrolled to the bottom of the homepage it's loaded >2MB. The convert pretty well, and my experience is that Stripe knows what they are doing better than most. So what should we be optimising for? Total page size? or a lightning fast experience with non-blocking content which can be as big as we require?
IMO developers need to optimise for building fast sites, not light ones for the sake of being light.
1.2mb will only be fast on fast hardware and a fast network. You’re not accounting for p90 load times. Targeting small page size is a better indicator of audience wide performance
Maybe we should optimize for both? Small page size is irrelevant if the loaded js renders the page unuseable for seconds, but the same thing is true on slower connections if you have to load tons of data in the first place.
Page size does not matter. Render time/time 'til functional does.
Stripe.com is 1.2MB fully loaded but is pretty much all non blocking so it feels as fast as a very small site. By the time you've scrolled to the bottom of the homepage it's loaded >2MB. The convert pretty well, and my experience is that Stripe knows what they are doing better than most. So what should we be optimising for? Total page size? or a lightning fast experience with non-blocking content which can be as big as we require?
IMO developers need to optimise for building fast sites, not light ones for the sake of being light.