Hefty Hedorah

At the time of writing, this website is approximately 68M in size, including drafts and excluding externally loaded resources like Font Awesome, KaTeX and some images.

Out of these 68M about 54M consists of images and 5.7M of other media.

In other words if this website was text-only it could be as small as 8.3M, and most likely even smaller if we consider other unnecessary stuff.

Like the actual kaiju Hedorah this website is growing and I would like to limit this growth.

Joining the small web

The small web¹ is exactly what it sounds like. I don't think the static site generator Nikola I'm using is the optimal tool for creating a truly small website and I wont be joining the 1MB Club anytime soon but I think it would be a cool and interesting project to try to keep this website below 10M.

The low hanging fruit

Thumbnails

I noticed that thumbnails are generated for a lot of images and since they are not referenced anywhere I can just remove them.

GIFs

Two large unnecessary gifs deleted.

Category XML feeds

To every category there is an associated XML feed that nobody uses. Deleted.

Now I'm down to 15M from 68M. That's quite a reduction with minimal effort.

My plan now is to look through all images and reduce size and or quality where applicable.

In the future I wont fall for the temptation of adding media to posts just for the sake of it.

I'll update this post if/when I manage to downsize further.

Sat Oct 23 03:19:17 PM CEST 2021

I'm down to 9.9M just by reducing some of the largest images.

Sun Oct 24 08:45:16 PM CEST 2021

By using jpegoptim I got my images down to 3.0 M giving me a total size of about 8.1M. Not bad.