Quoting Ben Hoyt

I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the "small web" as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Also, a bonus rant about microservices.

There is much more to his essay than just page weights. But out of interest I checked this post and realised the site and RSS logos were big .png files that I'd dropped in without much thought.

After shrinking the site logo and switching the RSS icon to this .svg file from the Mozilla Foundation, this post now clocks in at ~29KB (an 80% reduction from 144KB). Not bad.

I was even (semi) inspired by his call to stop putting pointless images at the top of blog posts. So the index page now shows posts like this with just a small quotation-mark glyph, instead of a cover image. I couldn't always show this much restraint though, essays still get a banner.