User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: August 15, 2016/@comment-24473195-20160816143918/@comment-24473195-20160816182451

> It's really not that big code-wise, especially compared to the rest of the site - text and a couple of small images.

Well, to put it into perspective it has become somewhat like the navboxes that wikia hides on portable devices because they take up too much space, and in many cases don't really offer any useful information to a reader, considering that scrolling that much would be tiresome.

It is ironic, Wikipedia had a horrible looking portal for years, and they've recently hidden a huge list of languages making the page look really modern) and keep working on improving performance by reducing assets on a page. Wikia on the other hand seems to be going in the opposite direction, adding huge assets to a page. To give concrete actionable examples:


 * Duplicate links - Some links in the footer are the same in the top nav
 * More images - This change adds more images on every page load (cached but still)
 * Fandom images (side bar)- Although I don't have anything against fandom idea it adds huge images that aren't even optimized (compressed) and possibly aren't cached because of how they are changed.
 * Footer takes up a whole page - People lose track of what they are looking for.
 * Performance - pages became noticebly slower the exact week the fandom was introduced, and the fandom stuff often extends from the sidebar to the "footer".
 * Javascript - There is more than 500 KB (sometimes > 1MB) worth of just javascript http://community.wikia.com/wiki/File:Wikiaperformance_devwikia.png)
 * https://www.webpagetest.org/result/160816_FG_1N9J/

I'm sure you will probably say to send this to C, but you have that data yourselves. Or you can try comparing one of the biggest wikipedia page (Barack Obama) with a moderate wikia page and you'll see a huge difference (http://www.webpagetest.org/).