As of the writing of this post, I maintain this site using my very own theme created in hugo. Hugo is a static site generator. It takes a bunch of plain text, applies a theme, and renders it as HTML. This is opposed to applications like Wordpress that assemble a page each time its served, to put it simply. This compute once, use many times approach saves on processing time and makes a site more portable. Case in point: this site is hosted on GitHub, but I can easily move it to any hosting service.

According to httparchive the average size of a web page in 2016 was around 2.5MB. Now this may not seem a lot in this age where the internet is the primary media delivery platform - but it is worth noting that most web pages serve text as their primary content. Looking at the report sheds light on what constitutes an average web page:

The HTML content takes up around 50-60kB. Images, understandably, make up the biggest chunk with ~1.6MB. Around another ~200kB are taken up by CSS and Font files. What is surprising to me is that the next biggest chunk, at above 400kB, is JavaScript.