Now a member of the 512KB Club

Bloaty websites have always been a bit of a bugbear of mine. Lots of pointless Javascript and images larger than the 1990s version of Microsoft Excel. The 512KB club exists to showcase performance-based websites from across the web. There are two rules for joining, firstly it must be a proper website (no cheating) and secondly it must be less than 512KB uncompressed. There are even three tiers, green team for sites less than 100KB, orange team for those less than 250KB and blue team for those less than 512KB. How did I do? I chose the wordpress.com Ici theme. Nice and lightweight, good base design and aligns with the minimalist feel I wanted for my blog. On first publishing the Ici theme I noted some large files and with the help of Claude (thanks Claude) I made two changes: The font. This was the big one. Ici ships Inter as separate font files for each weight, and the pages were downloading three of them, about 350 KB in total. I replaced them with a single variable Inter cut down to…