Top all-time · #4129
SpeedCurve
Company blog · speedcurve.com/blogwebprogramming
SpeedCurve is the company blog at speedcurve.com, writing about web and programming. Since 2013, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 32 times, most often “The average web page is 3MB. How much should we care?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link SpeedCurve's blog for web performance data, especially its page bloat analysis showing average page weight growing to about 3 MB, and for explanations of resource preloading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
User focused observability for mobile and web. See how people experience the speed of your website, then identify and fix performance issues.
Most-linked posts?
- The average web page is 3MB. How much should we care?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-08-17
- The average web page is 3MB. How much should we care?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-10
- User Timing and Custom Metrics2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-12
What Hacker News says?
One technique I've seen work well for getting bosses to care is showing them how much slower their sites are than their competitors - nobody wants to be worse than their competition. In SpeedCurve, for just around $8/mo per page/site you can set up daily synthetic checks for the business and its competitors, covering multiple profiles: mobile/3g, tablet/4g, desktop/fibre. You can use both the metrics (Start Render,…
on “Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate”Submitted JavaScript growth and third parties as a story · 57 points
HN discussion“This insanely unnecessary bandwidth usage penalizes sites that have long (>10) feeds with complete posts.” Since rss is text only the sizes are very small and compress well. Considering the average web page is 3M[0], pulling down 10-100k of every post ever doesn’t matter. And http takes care of not pulling the same file over and over. It’s certainly a downside, but completely useable as is, and better than any viab…
Comment linking /blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
on “Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS”Submitted User Timing and Custom Metrics as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI've been working in the web performance monitoring space ( https://speedcurve.com/ ) for 3 years now, and the 3 years prior to that I was doing a lot of performance work at the BBC. I can't share the data for obvious reasons but I can confidently say that the web is getting measurably slower every year, despite connection speeds increasing drastically over the last few years. We like to over-simplify and try to att…
Comment linking /
on “Is the web getting slower?”Submitted You need to know your site's performance plateau (and how to find it) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPages are now over 3 MB in size on average [1]. Just 5 years ago (already post-iphone) they were 800 KB. This mirrors my experience, where the mobile web feels slower despite my phone and connection being much faster. It seems web developers have stopped caring at all about performance. If you look at where the bloat went, it's mostly three things: - Images ballooned in size by a megabyte (without adding much extra…
Comment linking /blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
on “When did software go off the rails?”Submitted Ten years of web page bloat: What have we learned? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAt SpeedCurve we've built something similar for tracking and understanding the impact on website performance that third party requests can have. It's a big issue for websites when their user experience can be affected by resources that are not even under their control. We've seen websites where over 90% of the requests on a page are made to third parties. Here's a dashboard showing third party usage for The Guardian…
Comment linking /demo/thirdparty/1/1/chrome/1/30/39tfnozeq94p1o0hndk1kpbg4vb7cg/
on “WebXray”Submitted Visual diffs on every deploy as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think it's more of a resource prioritisation thing. I THINK If the resource is async, it will still scan the document to find all resources before the downloads begin. Adding preload basically just tells the browser that the resource is important and should begin the download immediately. Found this, kind of explains it https://speedcurve.com/blog/preload-scripts/
Comment linking /blog/preload-scripts/
on “Show HN: My multiplayer custom-engine game that loads in less than a second”Submitted The psychology of site speed and human happiness as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> ...a frequently-larger web app Got any stats for that? I was quickly able to find [0] and [1] which state that web page sizes are 1.5mb (median), 2mb (mean) and the average is about 3mb. [0] https://royal.pingdom.com/webpages-are-getting-larger-every-... [1] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
Comment linking /blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
on “App Clips for iOS”Submitted The average web page is 3MB. How much should we care? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI used to work for the companies that build these bloated websites. I spent a year rebuilding the BBC News front page to make it not-awful[1] but it felt like I was fighting against the rising tide. I've since moved on and now work at SpeedCurve. It's pretty motivating to see so many of our customers making their websites faster and generally better for the people who use them. It's also pretty depressing to know th…
Comment linking /blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
on “Bloated”Submitted JavaScript Dominates Browser CPU as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's worth adding above the fold (ATF) rendering as a technique. It's aim is to deliver pages on mobile within 1 second and requires a fundamental rethink of the way we architect CSS and our reliance on frameworks like Bootstrap. Ilya Grigorik presented the technique at the latest Velocity Conference and Google have now adopted it as recommendation at part of the PageSpeed Insights tool. http://www.youtube.com/watch…
Comment linking /
on “Responsive Design is Not About Screen Sizes Any More”Submitted In depth comparison of web perf rendering metrics as a story · 2 points
HN discussionUnfortunately too much JS has made the web slower, check this https://www.speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/ for a quick view or infrequently.org for longer explanations. React starts to be dated now and there are leaner alternatives offering most of the functional advantages, like Svelte or Lit. The tooling evolves indeed and I hope it gets again nearer to the browsers, thanks to web components, better…
Comment linking /blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
on “We improved React loading times with Next.js”Submitted The average web page is 3MB. How much should we care? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou can see more of my performance data visualizations (like PerfMap) in a recent talk I gave at Velocity NY. http://speedcurve.com/blog/velocity-a-better-waterfall-chart...
Comment linking /blog/velocity-a-better-waterfall-chart/
on “Front-end performance heatmap bookmarklet”Submitted PWA Performance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOn the responsive performance side of things, I've been building a tool to help track build differences and load performance across different viewport widths. Demo for The Guardian here... http://speedcurve.com/demo/
Comment linking /demo/
on “Responsive design tools”Submitted Square's new responsive website - breakdown of build and front-end performance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIn 2010 the average size was 626KB [0]. Now it's like 3MB. [1] [0] http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2013/06/05/web-page-growt... [1] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
Comment linking /blog/web-performance-page-bloat/
on “10 years of speed in Chrome”Submitted Monitor your front-end: synthetic testing vs real user monitoring as a story · 2 points
HN discussionInteresting to see the monitoring tools in place... New Relic, Mixpanel and Chartbeat. Would like to have seen more detail included from these, seem to be focused on backend. Where's the real user monitoring data or front-end performance via tools like http://www.webpagetest.org/ or http://speedcurve.com/demo/
Comment linking /demo/
on “HealthCare.gov Progress Report Final [pdf]”Submitted Web Performance for Product Managers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSpeedCurve is proving to be very profitable for a side project. Paid back initial $3k investment in server costs and now growing at 32% month on month. Can't live on it yet, but it will cover a couple of conferences and a two week holiday in New York this year. Also just won $10k in a startup competition, does that count as profit? ;) http://speedcurve.com/ For bootstrapped SaaS projects it's worth remembering how l…
Comment linking /
on “Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?”Submitted Window.onload is broken, use custom metrics to monitor user experience as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
