This is interesting:
Today I turned off my ad blocker, enabled JavaScript, opened my network monitor, and clicked the first link on Hacker News - a New York Times article. It started by downloading a megabyte of data as it rendered the page over the course of eight full seconds. The page opens with an advertisement 281 pixels tall, placed before even the title of the article. As I scrolled down, more and more requests were made, downloading a total of 2.8 MB of data with 748 HTTP requests. An article was weaved between a grand total of 1419 vertical pixels of ad space, greater than the vertical resolution of my display. Another 153-pixel ad is shown at the bottom, after the article. Four of the ads were identical.
…If these are the symptoms, what is the cure? My basic principles are these:
- Use no, or very little, JavaScript
- Use raster images sparingly, if at all, and optimize them
- Provide interactivity with forms and clever CSS
- Identify wasted bandwidth and CPU cycles and optimize them
https://drewdevault.com/2018/09/04/Conservative-web-development.html