The website obesity crisis

Websites are getting obese – and we should care

I neglected to link this when it first came out – but it’s a really provoking read on how quickly website sizes are spiralling out of control on a per page basis:

The article mentions that Google was able to boost user engagement in Google Maps by reducing the page weight from 100KB to 80KB.
Remember when Google Maps, the most sophisticated web app of its day, was thirty-five times smaller than a modern news article?

The key point: the size of the page is becoming disproportionally large against its key purpose: communicating information.