HTTP Archive Web Almanac
The Web Almanac is an annual, community-written report on the state of the web, published by the HTTP Archive project. Each edition is built from the HTTP Archive crawl of millions of real websites (rendered in a real browser, results stored in a public BigQuery dataset), so its findings are measured field data, not survey or vendor claims — which is why it serves as this wiki’s neutral baseline.
It is organized into chapters by topic (Page Weight, JavaScript, Third Parties, Performance, CSS, Fonts, …), each authored by volunteer experts and peer-reviewed. The data is reproducible from the underlying HTTP Archive tables.
Why it anchors this wiki
Most other sources here are advocacy (landing-page-14kb), tooling READMes (squint), or vendor guidance (performance-budgets-101). The Web Almanac is the independent, quantitative counterweight — it tells us what the web actually weighs and how little optimization is actually adopted. Chapters ingested:
- web-almanac-page-weight-2024 — median page weight + resource breakdown
- web-almanac-third-parties-2024 — prevalence and weight of third-party-resources
It directly grounds page-weight and the cross-wiki “bytes are necessary-but-not- sufficient” point in synthesis.