Where the Web Stands After a Year of Growth
The HTTP Archive’s annual survey of the web digs into how over 7 million sites are built. The resulting report covers everything from performance and security to how developers write HTML and CSS. Among the many insights, the data on CSS usage is particularly telling—and not entirely flattering.
CSS Sizes Keep Creeping Up
CSS payloads continue to grow year over year. The median desktop page now loads 62 KB of CSS, and the heaviest 10% of pages push past 240 KB. Mobile pages are only slightly lighter, running 4 to 7 KB less across all percentiles. That growth is real, but it is still far outpaced by JavaScript: the median page carries 444 KB of script, and the top 10% weigh in at a hefty 1.2 MB.
The Myth of the Single Stylesheet
Conventional wisdom says to consolidate CSS into one external file, but that practice is rare in the wild. Only about 7% of pages actually serve all their styles from a single remote stylesheet. The median page instead contains three <style> elements and six remote stylesheets. At the high end, 10% of pages ship with more than 20 remote CSS files and over 14 inline style blocks.
This fragmentation is more than a stylistic quirk—it has measurable consequences. Each additional remote stylesheet introduces another round trip, which is especially costly on mobile connections where latency dominates. While the overhead may be tolerable on desktop, it undermines performance for a large share of users.
The full report, broken into sections on performance, security, and markup languages among others, is worth exploring for a deeper look at how web development evolved over the past year.
