The web used to be faster. We measured how much.
The median web page is over five times heavier than it was in 2012. Almost none of that weight is the thing you came to read.
Pull up the BBC News homepage in 2012. Median total page weight: roughly 460 kilobytes. Twelve HTTP requests. It rendered in about 800 milliseconds on a fast connection.
Pull it up today. Median page weight across the web in 2025: 2.4 megabytes. 78 HTTP requests. Two and a half seconds to first paint on the same connection. Not because screens got bigger or images got prettier. Because a decade of ads, trackers, tag managers, consent banners, and JavaScript frameworks all accumulated in the same place.
Where the weight went
We broke down the growth over the last 13 years using HTTP Archive data. The headline: the actual content (HTML, CSS, meaningful images) grew about 1.6 times. Everything else, ad exchanges, tracker scripts, session-replay tools, cookie-consent frameworks, A/B-test orchestrators, grew more than ten times.
On a typical news site, we looked at which of the 78 requests were strictly necessary for reading the article. Answer: nine. The other 69 were infrastructure for advertising, measurement, and what the industry likes to call 'engagement optimisation'.
Our own measurements
Hushdot ships with a local benchmark that runs the same test on your browser, with and without the extension active. Across the UK top 100 sites, the average we see on consumer hardware:
- Page weight drops by 58 per cent
- Time to first paint drops by 52 per cent
- JavaScript execution time drops by 63 per cent
- Battery impact on laptops drops by about 30 per cent on typical news-browsing sessions
These aren't synthetic numbers. The test runs in your browser when you install Hushdot, so the comparison is against your actual hardware, your actual connection, and the actual sites you visit.
The thing we call 'calm browsing'
We called the product Hushdot because the experience we're trying to deliver isn't faster browsing per se, though the pages are faster. It's the experience of the last decade's accumulated noise being reversed on your machine specifically.
Pages load. You read them. Nothing jumps, nothing watches, nothing asks you to subscribe before you've scrolled. That's the baseline Hushdot restores. It's not revolutionary. It's just what the web used to feel like.