2025-05-08-joining-the-512kb-club.md

Joining The 512KB Club

Since February 2025, my website’s now listed on The 512KB Club! This collection of small websites is a showcase of what’s possible when you set out to do a lot, using only a little. Let’s see what that’s all about and why it matters.

# Performant and useful websites

The 512KB Club is a curated list of websites that follow these two basic rules:

  1. The website must be an actual site that contains a reasonable amount of information.
  2. The total uncompressed web resources must not exceed 512KB.

In order for a website to be included, you have to run a Cloudflare URL Scan on your website and if the uncompressed size is less than 512KB, you’re eligible. Each site has to be submitted as a pull request with proof of scan results. If it passes code review, you’re listed with all the other gloriously-small websites at 512KB.club.

It’s a neat idea, and it definitely nerd-sniped me because of the performance aspect. I really like fast, slim websites, especially when they are bringing visitors in with the intention to read content.

# The club promotes usability as a side-effect

The 512KB Club is interesting for a number of reasons. The first rule “must be an actual site that contains a reasonable amount of information” is crucial, and I love that this is rule #1. The 512KB Club FAQ has a highlighted section that answers why ultra-minimal link pages don’t qualify:

The whole point of the 512KB Club is to showcase what can be done with 512KB of space. Anyone can come along and make a <10KB site containing 3 lines of CSS and a handful of links to other pages.

That’s NOT a good showcase of what can be done with 512KB.

What we’re looking for are sites with interesting design concepts that prove 512KB is a load of space that you can do so much with.

So this is not about code-golfing a page down to an absurd level, or sending plain text to clients in HTTP responses. The goal is to be deliberate with the resources you’re using during development and what you send down the wire.

A lot of modern websites are slow and massive, and this is consistently trending upwards since the dawn of time:

The sum of transfer size kilobytes of all resources requested by the page since 2011

The 512KB Club bucks this trend to show what developers can do with a small footprint, leaving plenty of breathing room.

Another side-effect of chasing this metric is that it nudges people towards designing accessible websites. Accessibility shouldn’t be a side-quest, but browsers are most efficient when they’re parsing and rendering properly-structured HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Libraries and other tools (not to mention AI-generated slop) often produce garbled, generated content in a way that negatively impacts accessibility. If everything is flat <div>s all the way down, assistive technologies like screen readers can’t present sensible information for people to coherently navigate.

The bottom line is that a stripped-down, standards-based approach to web dev may be less exciting to build with, but it’s what the most amount of clients can support, enabling more people to use and enjoy your projects.

# Some picks from the 512KB Club

It’s no surprise that a lot of these pages are personal blogs, as this type of website lends itself to being hacked on. A personal blog is great not only for communication, but for testing out different technologies, coding, or design patterns. Here’s a few others I chose from the club in no particular order:

  • cli.club [25.5Kb]: A collection of CLI software covering a wide range of categories from messaging, music, text editing and more.
  • mattstein.com [206Kb]: Matt’s a designer, developer, and former technical writer who has a great site that showcases a lot of projects and talents.
  • bestmotherfucking.website [5.4Kb]: I can’t really omit this one due to infamy. One to avoid if you’re sensitive to profanity, but this made a splash around 2017 in reaction to bloated web trends.
  • silviamaggidesign.com [311Kb]: Designer and Accessibility Specialist Silvia Maggi has a website with a nice aesthetic that’s also easy to read and navigate.
  • lichess.org [495Kb]: The awesome Lichess is a free/libre, open-source chess server powered by volunteers and donations. It just scrapes into club membership with 17Kb to spare.
  • slowernews.com [169Kb]: A curated site of notable news items, things likely to trend on Hacker News. It looks like new content arrives a few times per month.

Aside from these, I would recommend taking a look through some of the pages at random as the directory is a mix of different types of pages, and it’s a unique way to discover something new. I think the best ones live somewhere in the middle in terms of page weight, as sites around 200Kb will be balancing performance and delivering engaging and nice-looking content.

# Keeping it performant

My PR was merged on February 13th, so a big thanks to the maintainers for including me. I’m delighted to be part of the club so that I can now show off this beautiful Orange Team banner on my site:

Thanks a lot for reading! Feel free to get in touch on Bluesky if you have any thoughts or recommendations.

# See also

Published: