A small critique of that project - a large portion of the websites included are simply personal sites for developers - nothing barely more technical than a business card or CV. I would exclude those or categorize them differently, as to me their "usefulness" seems relatively edge case.

14kB club: “Amateurs!!!”

https://dev.to/shadowfaxrodeo/why-your-website-should-be-under-14kb-in-size-398n

a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.

This is because of the TCP slow start algorithm. This article will cover what that is, how it works, and why you should care.

That's cute. Go check out some 64k intros.

https://64k-scene.github.io/

I need a CDN free single GET request club

That's a pretty cool site. I always wanted to set up my own simple, html page for a personal blog. Lots of inspiration in these pages. Crazy there's functional web pages less than 2.03KB in size.

512kb? So much bloat..

I remember being amazed at Yahoo!'s load times on 56K. Pulled the code, 79K.

My web pages are larger. But not because of script junk and graphics. The texts simply are that long.

It's basically 1% markup and 99% visible text.

First of all, I take a bit of umbrage at the author's constant reference to "website size" without defining what this means until you dig into the FAQ. Just blithely referring to everything as "size" is a bit misleading, since I imagine most people would immediately assume size on disk which obviously makes no sense from a web browsing perspective. And indeed, they actually mean total data transferred on a page load.

Also, basically all this does is punish sites that use images. I run an ecommerce website (and no, I'm not telling you lunatics which one) and mine absolutely would qualify handily, except... I have to provide product images. If I didn't, my site would technically still "work" in a broad and objective sense, but my customers would stage a riot.

A home page load on our site is just a shade over 2 megabytes transferred, the vast majority of which is product images. You can go ahead and run an online store that actually doesn't present your customers any products on the landing page if you want to, and let me know how that works out for you.

I don't use any frameworks or external libraries or jQuery or any of that kind of bullshit that has to be pulled down on page load. Everything else is a paltry (these days) 115.33 kB. I'mna go ahead and point out that this is actually less to transfer than jabroni has got on his own landing page, which is 199.31 kB. That's code and content only for both metrics, also not including his sole image — which is his favicon, and that is for some inexplicable reason given the circumstances a 512x512 .png. (I used the Firefox network profiler to generate these numbers.)

Thanks for sharing. Great inspiring collection.