A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
That's only doable with a text-centric website. I'm currently finishing a photography section for my personal website, and the gallery pages are several hundred kBs in size, while single photo page is almost 1MB in size (provided you load it on a 28" screen; browser will load smaller variants on smaller screens). Most of that weight is the thumbnails (and almost-full-size photo in the latter case). The only JS I have is 6 lines (before minifying) on single photo pages which allow you to go to next or previous photo with keyboard arrows. I don't use any CSS frameworks, just a single hand-written CSS file. I don't have any tracking, analytics, social media features or anything of this sort.<p>So if even a personal site being done with no deadlines, no pressure from management to include analytics etc. can't do it, because it wants to display a bunch of photos, then I don't think we can expect "web-scale" websites to achieve it.