[untog]

Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.

Because it isn't as important. If there were all the time in the world, we'd all be able to make our web sites as small as possible, but in reality, it's just not necessary. Yes, there are minorities of users that need it, and depending on what market you're in it could be important. But for most people it isn't.

[gdubs]

It's actually important in two major ways. First, conversion rates have been known to increase in correlation with site speed [1]. Second, mobile devices are often on terrible connections.

1: http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-load...