Quoting Ben Hoyt

I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the "small web" as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Also, a bonus rant about microservices.

There is much more to his essay than just page weights. But out of interest I checked this post and realised the site and RSS logos were big .png files that I'd dropped in without much thought.

After shrinking the site logo and switching the RSS icon to this .svg file from the Mozilla Foundation, this post now clocks in at ~29KB (an 80% reduction from 144KB). Not bad. The icon has changed again since: it's Lucide's now, and it isn't a file at all — it's inline in the site header, so it costs nothing to fetch.

I was even (semi) inspired by his call to stop putting pointless images at the top of blog posts. So the index page dropped cover images, showing posts like this one with just a small quotation-mark glyph instead. I couldn't always manage that much restraint though, and the longer posts still got a banner. Both went the same way in the end: the glyph, the banner and the whole idea of typed posts are retired, and the index is a plain list of titles and dates now.