How Big Are Real‑World JavaScript Bundles? Surprising Sizes of Popular Sites
A 2024 survey of uncompressed JavaScript bundle sizes across various popular websites reveals that many sites far exceed the expected 1‑5 MB range, with static sites like Wikipedia at just 0.2 MB and multimedia giants like YouTube reaching 12 MB, highlighting the wide performance spectrum in modern web development.
In 2024, what is the average size of a website's JavaScript file? 1 MB, 5 MB, 10 MB, or even larger?
Modern front‑end technologies have made websites richer, and with increasingly powerful devices many assume performance is no longer a concern, often loading more than 10 MB of JavaScript.
Static‑page‑focused sites
Wikipedia, 0.2 MB
Linear, 3 MB
Zoom, 6 MB
Vercel, 6 MB
Gitlab, 13 MB
Medium, 3 MB
Quora, 4.5 MB
Pinterest, 10 MB
Search‑function‑focused sites
StackOverflow, 3.5 MB
NPM, 4 MB
Airbnb, 7 MB
Google, 9 MB
Simple‑interaction single‑page apps
Google Translate, 2.5 MB
ChatGPT, 7 MB
Video / multimedia sites
Loom, 7 MB
YouTube, 12 MB
Pornhub, 1.4 MB
Wikipedia has the smallest JavaScript bundle at 0.2 MB, followed by Pornhub at 1.4 MB. Pornhub, which receives 130 million daily visits, emphasizes extreme performance; its engineers state the site primarily uses native JavaScript.
For comparison, the jQuery library itself is only 0.1 MB.
Programmer DD
A tinkering programmer and author of "Spring Cloud Microservices in Action"
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