Browsing the web on a 50 MB data budget

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 22:50:53 -0400

In a 2019 article for Smashing Magazine, Chris Ashton talks about what it’s like to browse the web with just 50 MB worth of data transfer per day, mimicking what might be economically realistic in developing countries without extensive broadband or mobile networks.

The point isn’t to see how many pages Chris can view (spoiler alert: not many), but instead to give practical tips for reducing the size of web pages and the data needed to transfer them, which translates into benefits for all of a site’s visitors. I won’t spoil all the tips, but most of them come down to minifying, compressing, and otherwise being selective about what data gets loaded and when. And in general, it’s really just being more empathetic and understanding the situations that all your users are in.

This blog post is the last in a series of articles written by Chris. They’re all good, and maybe I’ll talk about some of the other ones in the future, but go ahead and read them all now. You won’t regret it.

1MB Club - Reducing website bloat

Sat, 21 Nov 2020 00:47:43 -0400

1MB Club is a collection of sites with a simple criteria:

The one and only rule for a web page to qualify as a member:

Total resources downloaded client-side must not exceed 1 megabyte

Reducing bloat on web pages is a noble goal, but 1MB is pretty generous.

As of right now, this site fits well within that budget. But of course, there’s not a lot here yet. ;-)

(h/t @JoshMock)

bloat on Improving the Net

Browsing the web on a 50 MB data budget

1MB Club - Reducing website bloat