According to the HTTPArchive , the average transfer size of all HTML responses for a single website is 50kB. That's not much -- especially when compared to the size of JS, CSS, image, or even font resources -- but those 50kB nonetheless add to the ever increasing bloat of webpages. Bloated webpages make websites dreadfully slow, and even a minor increase in load time can cause a significant decrease in sales, according to both Google and Amazon . So HTML transfer size matters; it's an important metric to pay attention to and to reduce. That's why I'll be focusing on several ways in which to reduce that 50kb number in this article. To begin, let's take a look at a few websites. A cursory check of the top 500 websites shows that they contain dozens of useless tags that neither add value to end-users nor to browsers tasked with rendering them. A case in point is the Engadget website, which can be inspected by right-clicking on the site's homepage and s