teardown: kaisermann.me, 19 kb of html and no headings
web · 2026-11-01 · 4 min
this is a study, not a client project. i did not build kaisermann.me. i measured it on 1 november 2026, and the author is credited below.
the site belongs to christian kaisermann, a web engineer in berlin. it is the opposite experiment to the previous teardown: almost no weight, and almost no structure.
what the measurement says
- html: 19 kb
- external javascript: 8 kb across 4 scripts
- css: 11 kb in one stylesheet
- first response: 207 ms, served by cloudflare
- headings: zero h1, zero h2
- metadata: title 25 characters, description 33, no canonical, no json-ld
- images on the first document: zero
nineteen kilobytes. the whole document is smaller than a single hero image on most sites. that is not an accident, it is a decision.
what works
the weight is the design. a text-first page, a short introduction, links to resume, email and linkedin. no carousel, no cookie banner, no chat widget. it loads before you decide to leave.
the content is specific. "carioca based in berlin, web engineer, css enthusiast and avid open-sourcerer" tells you who this is in one sentence. then what he is working on, then how to reach him. a portfolio that respects the reader.
no images means no alt problem. the page has nothing to describe because it does not pretend to be a gallery.
one stylesheet. 11 kb. the typography does the work that decoration usually does.
the gaps
no headings at all. the page has strong visual hierarchy and zero semantic hierarchy. a screen reader user gets a wall of text with no way to jump between sections. the fix is three lines: an h1 with the name, h2 for the sections.
no canonical. two versions of the url (with or without a trailing slash, or /index.html) can both be indexed. cheap to add, cheap to forget.
description of 33 characters. it is not a description, it is a fragment. a search result will rewrite it from the page, which is fine, but a written 140-character sentence would control the snippet.
no structured data. a person and a website schema would take twenty minutes and give search engines the same certainty the design already gives a human.
what i would keep
the restraint. the page proves that a personal site does not need a framework, a font pair and a scroll animation to feel considered. it opens instantly, reads in one minute, and has one job: get an email.
what i would fix
- add the heading outline (h1, h2, h3) without changing a pixel.
- add canonical and a real meta description.
- add person and website json-ld.
- keep everything else exactly as it is.
the lesson is not "make it minimal". it is that craft and completeness are different axes. this site is excellent on one and incomplete on the other, and both are visible in the measurement.
site: kaisermann.me, author: christian kaisermann, repository: kaisermann/kaisermann (mit). measurements taken by fetching the public page on 1 november 2026.
if you want the same check on your site, book a 30-minute call or read a fast website: what it actually means.