Web Almanac 2024 — Page Weight

The Page Weight chapter of the HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024 — an annual, community-written, data-driven report built on the HTTP Archive crawl of millions of real websites (October 2024 data). This is the neutral baseline the wiki had been missing: not a provocation or a vendor claim, but measured field data on what the web actually weighs.

Headline numbers (median page, Oct 2024)

Year-over-year (vs. 2022), the median page grew: desktop +8.6% (≈210 KB), mobile +6.4% (≈140 KB). Over a decade, the median mobile page grew ~357% (≈1.8 MB added). The headline read: page weight "continues to grow, almost at the same rate" — bloat is the default trajectory.

Where the bytes go (median desktop homepage)

Images are still the heaviest payload, but JavaScript is now the most-requested file type (24 files, vs. images down 43% from 2022's 25 requests). This corroborates the bundle-size thesis: JS is the byte category that's both heavy and proliferating.

Optimization is under-adopted

The chapter's quietly damning finding: basic wins are left on the table. Only 70% of desktop homepages use proper text compression; CSS/JS minification dropped since 2022 (to ~62% CSS, ~58% JS). At the 90th percentile, mobile Total Blocking Time hits 5,786 ms — a real accessibility burden on low-end devices.

Why this matters here

• Corroborates landing-page-14kb. That provocation cited a "~2,600 KB median" bloat baseline; the Almanac measures 2,652 KB desktop — independent confirmation, not a contradiction.
• Grounds the cross-wiki tension. The under-adoption of compression and the TBT tail show that delivery (compression, JS execution) shapes outcomes alongside raw bytes — the "necessary-but-not-sufficient" point in synthesis.
• Anchors the page-weight concept page and feeds third-party-resources (much of the JS is third-party — see web-almanac-third-parties-2024).

Caveat: a homepage crawl (not full user journeys); medians hide a heavy long tail.