From 7 MB to 600 KB
Rebuilding vtes.co.za: what a static site buys, with numbers.
The site
vtes.co.za is the home of the South African community around Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, a card game from 1994. It has about twenty regular players across Johannesburg and Cape Town, a diary of game nights and sanctioned tournaments, and a stream of posts announcing them.
It is a volunteer project with no budget. Everything had to be free to run and simple enough for a player with no technical background to contribute to.
What was wrong
The home page was seven megabytes. Most of that was artwork: full-size posters scaled down by the browser, so a visitor downloaded a 1,400-pixel image to view it at 400 pixels. On a mobile network in South Africa that is an abandoned page.
Two further problems cost the community reach:
- Share previews did not work. Posting a game night into a WhatsApp group produced a bare link, because portrait share images render as a small square.
- Google did not recognise events. Dates and venues were prose, so search results showed text and not a date and place.
What changed
- Images. Every picture ships at 400 and 800 pixels beside the full size, with
srcset. Everything is WebP. - Landscape share images. Each post has a 1200 × 750 thumbnail used as its
og:image, so announcements show as a banner. - Structured data. Each event declares start time, venue, city and price as schema.org
Eventmarkup. - Contributor workflow. Players submit posts as markdown through a pull request. Automated checks catch missing artwork, broken links, oversized images and unreplaced placeholder text.
- Nothing to attack. No database, no content management system, no login page.
The result
The home page went from 7 MB to under 600 KB. The whole site now weighs less than the old home page did. Hosting is free, there is no software stack to patch and there is no administrator account to compromise.
Why it is here
This is the argument for how Adamant Tech builds websites, with numbers, on a site that Adamant Tech can show in full. The Simple Website Template is built the same way.