November 4, 2025
The web in skinny jeans
The 512KB Club
Shrink your site, starve the trackers, and join the skinny web
TLDR: A volunteer-run “512KB Club” spotlights sites that keep pages under 512KB to fight web bloat. The comments explode over whether ads and trackers cause most of the heaviness, if simple sites are too easy to game, and whether big companies can ever be this lean — with Lichess’s absence adding spice.
The internet has been bulking up on megabytes, and the 512KB Club just clapped back with a strict “skinny web” diet: keep your whole page under 512KB uncompressed and prove you’ve got real content. Fans cheered the Green Team (<100KB) as the super-skinny elite, while volunteers asked for coffee money to keep the club running. Cue the drama: one commenter gasped that Google Analytics alone can be 430KB, and another swore the bloat is “advertising and data tracking… Every. Single. Time.” People joked about putting the web on keto and recommended Pi-hole/ad blockers like a seatbelt for browsing.
Then the debate kicked off. Is this cool or kind of pointless? Critics argued it’s easy to build a tiny page with “three lines of CSS,” but comparing complex sites fairly is hard. One voice said building a small site is “trivial,” but doing it for a whole company with many departments? That’s hard. Meanwhile, an old thread resurfaced via this link, and folks noted that fan-favorite chess site Lichess dropped off the list — instant gossip fuel. Whether it’s a fad or a movement, the crowd wants less fluff, fewer trackers, and a faster, saner web — preferably with no “JavaScript dad bod.”
Key Points
- •The 512KB Club showcases websites focused on performance and low resource usage.
- •To qualify, a site must contain a reasonable amount of information and not be just a link page.
- •Total uncompressed web resources for a qualifying site must not exceed 512KB.
- •The article highlights common causes of web bloat: large JavaScript libraries, client-side requests, and complex front-end frameworks.
- •It advises practical optimizations, including minimizing extra JavaScript, choosing lighter WordPress themes, limiting custom fonts, and optimizing images; the club is volunteer-run and welcomes donations.