January 15, 2025
Download the whole Bible

“Some webpages use so much unnessecary code, they could as well (down)load the whole Bible.” This was a thought I had. I tried it out and attached the complete Bible text to the content of this page. And guess what? It is still fast!

Although the source code contains the complete Bible text, this page still has an 89 performance score on desktop and a 59 performance score on mobile. I added the Bible in plain text and I did not use any monkey business. Go ahead and inspect the page! You will find all of the 4 point something Megabyte in a hidden pre element below the content.

If I would have been a tiny bit smarter, I would have used an async function to load the Bible content. That would have given me a perfect Google Lighthouse score on desktop (an improvement of 11 points) and a 75 performance score on mobile (an improvement of 16 points).

Please know that I do not want to convert you to any sort of religion. I only want to show you that you can add EXTREMELY large amounts of data to a webpage, without damaging its performance. The Bible is something a lot of people value and most people know. I use it here as a measurement of an amount of data and code, not as content or as a religious document. I could have said ‘much’, but that would make less impact.

So, next time I see a slow webpage, you might hear me say: “Your webpage uses so much unnessecary code, you could as well download the whole Bible.” The funny thing is that even if you did that, it could still be faster than the average website out there.

()  Joost van der Schee

Show the Bible
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