Page weight
Page weight is the total number of bytes a browser must download to load a page — the sum of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts, and other resources. It is the wiki’s central, founding concept: the thing minimalism tries to shrink and the thing the domain (“page-weight minimalism, front-end byte budgets”) is named for.
The measured baseline
Per web-almanac-page-weight-2024 (HTTP Archive, Oct 2024), the median page weighs 2,652 KB on desktop / 2,311 KB on mobile, and is still growing (~+7% YoY; mobile up ~357% over a decade). Composition of the median desktop homepage:
- Images ≈ 1,054 KB (heaviest payload)
- JavaScript ≈ 613 KB (most-requested file type; the growth driver)
- Fonts ≈ 131 KB · CSS ≈ 78 KB · HTML ≈ 18 KB
Relation to neighbouring concepts
- bundle-size is the JS-app-era subset of page weight — the JS bytes specifically. As apps replace static pages, bundle size dominates the total.
- third-party-resources cut across the breakdown: much of the JS and image weight is loaded by third parties, not first-party code (web-almanac-third-parties-2024).
- performance-budget is how you cap page weight (e.g. quantity-based limits on total bytes, JS size, image size).
- core-web-vitals are the field outcome: page weight feeds LCP/INP, but is necessary-but-not-sufficient — delivery and execution matter too (see synthesis).
Floors and budgets
Two named targets bracket “how low”: landing-page-14kb‘s 14 KB (first TCP round-trip, static landing pages) and web.dev’s 170 KB critical-path budget (performance-budgets-101). Both sit far below the 2,652 KB median — the bloat is largely optional.