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In nearly every subfield of computing, along nearly every metric, most people would kill for a 20% improvement.

A processor 20% faster would dominate the market for years. A new compression algorithm that was 20% smaller would be either copied or used by every archiving system. And yes, a website reduced by 20% is significant.



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>In nearly every subfield of computing, along nearly every metric, most people would kill for a 20% improvement

I doubt it. 20% is not even worth to turn a straightforward algorithm to a more complex and convoluted (but more performant) one, or to switch backend technology, or db store, etc.

As for a "20% faster processor"? Big deal, I was raised in an era when we got 2x faster processors every 2 years.

(Besides, we do have processors that are 20% faster than others, and they don't "dominate" the market, even at the same price range some might go for perceived quality stability -- e.g Intel vs AMD, over the small speed increase).

>And yes, a website reduced by 20% is significant.

To whom? It's as if people never heard of opportunity cost.

Just go measure how many websites, even leading ones, go to any great measure to reduce such bloat, and you'll find that it's not that significant in the real world. Up to a point, of which 20% is not even close, you can be bloated without punishment in the modern web.


If you use the correct tools, such optimizations introduce little complexity, if any. Just add a gulp plugin or select "optimize assets" in your Netlify panel or something similar.

If not using the correct tools, simply you won't survive for long in the market. Probabely you can still manage to sell domains or such, but can't compete in innovation-based sections.


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