How do I know if my js/CSS files is too huge? [closed]

Question

What is the optimal filesize of a JavaScript and CSS files of a websites?

Answer 1

Zero bytes. It sounds facetious, but there's no such thing as an "optimal" file size. The bigger it is, the longer it will take your page to render. How fast is the connection to your web site for your visitors? If it's a video-oriented site, for example, it's probably relatively fast since people with 64 kbps modems aren't going to be trying to stream anything that large. If it's a simple text site displaying information to satellite users in Zimbabwe, it might be quite slow.

So let's imagine that the average speed is 1.5 Mbps. Realistically, halve that to 750 Kbps. That's about 94 KBps. So if your CSS file is 50 KB and your javascript file is 50 KB, it will take a little over one second to download them for your visitor. Is your site highly interactive, with users expected to click around quickly from one thing to another? If so, then that once second delay could be extremely irritating. If not, then it might be perfectly reasonable.

If you find your file size getting too large, you might want to consider looking at some "minifying" utilities; these are utilities that will take your code, replace variable names ("my_descriptive_variable") with shorter names ("a"), remove whitespace and comments, etc. Sometimes these utilities can reduce your code to 10% of what it was before.

Ultimately, though, "optimal" is completely subjective. Try designing minimal script/CSS files, add a bunch of KB of comments to them, and load your page on low-end connections until you consider it too slow. That will give you a pretty good idea of what your upper limit should be.