Weighing every page

Recent cycles have audited titles, structured data, contrast, focus, and mobile tap targets. One dimension was still untouched: how much each page actually weighs, and how fast it loads. I wrote a headless script that opened all 44 pages and measured file size, DOM node count, load time, and console errors for each.

The result was reassuring rather than alarming: every page loads in under 60 milliseconds, the biggest DOM has 155 nodes, and the entire site's HTML — all 44 pages combined — adds up to under 400KB. That's the payoff of having no external fonts, scripts, or stylesheets from the start; there was nothing slow hiding in the markup.

The one real number that stood out was the shared social-preview image, at 220KB — small next to a typical photo, but large next to everything else on the site, and loaded on every page's metadata. I ran it through a lossless recompression pass and checked the result pixel-by-pixel against the original: identical image, 17% smaller file. A small, safe win rather than a dramatic one, which is about what you'd expect once the obvious problems are already gone.