Web Bloat  

[edit] As an amusing update to this article, I found this site: http://www.webbloatscore.com/ it turns any page you give it into an image map and then compares that size to your original payload.

I’ve linked an interesting article here, which talks about the ever-increasing size of web pages. Things like advertisements, images, and other eye-candy are continuing to cause page bloat. While there are a number of problems with this, a lot of them boil down to slow page loads. I don’t know about any of you, but when I have to wait more than 2 or 3 seconds for a page to load, I get really frustrated. Especially if it’s a page I have to use on a regular basis. Using tools like ghostery and ublock, I really get a good idea about how much time tracking pixels/ads/etc take to load up. Visiting a certain page without any blocking add-ons enabled, Chrome tells me it takes 4.55 seconds for the page to load - which doesn’t include some resources (the Finish time is 48.46 seconds). Now opening that same page with blocking add-ons turned on, it only took 1.12 seconds to load the page, and 16.86 seconds total to finish everything (which of course does not include advertisements or tracking pixels). It is a bad user experience to have pages that slow (besides the fact that nobody likes being tracked, or shown annoying advertisements).

https://www.nateberkopec.com/2015/10/07/frontend-performance-chrome-timeline.html

Here is an interesting article that talks about tracking your page load times in chrome, and how to determine what stages of the process are taking the most time. The chrome dev tools can be helpful, but there are also utilities like New Relic which can give you much more consistent information from production.

Optimization is really the answer here. I understand that advertisements and tracking pixels are somewhat of a necessary evil, there is a ton of optimization that can be done there. Pages should load in under 2 seconds. Preferably under 1!