Framework-Heavy Sites Carry a Heavy Price
Tim Kadlec’s latest research delivers a sobering verdict for the JavaScript ecosystem. Analyzing a broad swath of the web, he finds that sites built with frameworks are consistently bulkier and more resource-hungry than those that skip them entirely. Angular leads the pack in sheer payload size, while React proves the most demanding on CPU cycles.
Yet Kadlec cautions against blaming the libraries themselves. As he puts it, the data “says very little about the performance of the core frameworks in play and much more about the approach to development these frameworks may encourage.” The real culprit, he suggests, is not the tool but the habits it seeds.
A notable gap in the dataset: it measures only first-load performance, leaving post-initialization behavior unexamined—a blind spot for single-page-app architectures where most of the work happens later. That caveat matters, especially when judging SPA-style patterns.
… it says very little about the performance of the core frameworks in play and much more about the approach to development these frameworks may encourage
Even the top-performing 10% of framework sites look mediocre next to plain-HTML alternatives. Frameworks aren’t inherently unperformant, but they’re doing nothing to reverse a troubling trend. The situation mirrors the accessibility debate: frameworks aren’t precisely at fault, yet they remain the single best leverage point to fix the problem.
