Consider that when most people get sites that don't meet their needs their gut reaction is to open 20 tabs and mentally slice data from all over the website. That doesn't seem very progressive either.
I am not saying there is no need for more complex web sites. Personally I just think it is sad that in 2015 there are lots of sites that won't load anything at all if you disable JS or have a bad connection.
With a 50k connection at home I simply can't accept waiting 3+ seconds until your site loaded its 500kb of JS and 4 different web fonts to finally show something.
Although I'm pretty sure the download size from a CDN is far less important from a performance standpoint (within reason). More important things include:
- Time to first byte from a slow'ish server (.5s to create the HTML and .5s to deliver).
- How many separate requests you are making (somewhat going away with http2)
Can we start ranting about the excessive amounts of tracking pixels everywhere now :)?
With a 50k connection at home I simply can't accept waiting 3+ seconds until your site loaded its 500kb of JS and 4 different web fonts to finally show something.