A lightweight website

Since the start of this site, having a lightweight website has been one of my priorities. Every file served has been minimized, you won't see any pictures that aren't vector graphics (except for the favicon.ico file) and users don't need to download fonts or JavaScript libraries. On top of that, the amount of JavaScript required is minimum. Indeed, as of right now, the only JS that runs is a very simple function to toggle the theme and another one to open the navigation menu on small screens. That results in super lightweight pages, which keeps the loading time to a minimum and reduces the bandwidth usage of the server.

The one thing I've had doubts about is minimizing HTML. Some friends argued that minimizing the code obscures it, while I argued that it is easy to prettify HTML with one of the many tools online. However, lately, I have been a bit frustrated with Hugo's minimizing tool as it had some unexpected behavior with SVG's, so I decided to investigate the pros and cons of file minimization a bit further.

When you access a webpage it is normally compressed (if the server supports it), and this compression makes the previous minimization of files almost useless. Let me explain: my main blog page's size is about 18.3KB, but it can be reduced down to 17.2KB with Hugo's minimizing tool¹. Once compressed with gzip, the sizes are 5845 and 5747 bytes respectively, so the bandwidth save is only 100 bytes! Similar results have been obtained for all the pages of the site that I have tested, so it looks like minimizing isn't helping that much.

On the other hand, I see the point made by the friends who argue that having the code available when pressing view source can be useful, even if code could potentially be prettified. Given this, I have decided not to minimize the HTML files. A similar argument could be made to not minimize CSS and JS (indeed, in the future I might change my mind), but they will stay minimized for now².

1. It is actually 15.5KB, but that includes errors on the SVG's minified, once fixed, it becomes the 17.2KB mentioned. ↩
2. These files can be found more easily on the source code since they are not build up from templates, and it is uncommon to view the source code of those files, as they are normally viewed from the browser's inspection tools. On top of that, CSS is "compiled" from SCSS files, and once again, these files are easily reachable at the public repository of the website. Finally, the change in size is higher (1.5KB for the CSS file). ↩