Shrinking a React bundle: what actually moved the number

[ EXECUTIVE TEARDOWN // TL;DR ]

• Measure compressed bytes, not raw; a treemap showing raw sizes will send you after the wrong dependency.
• Barrel files defeat tree-shaking by making the whole module look reachable; import from the source path instead.
• Split on routes and on genuinely optional UI, not on every component, or you trade one big request for fifty small ones.
• Smaller is not automatically faster; Total Blocking Time is what users feel, and parse-and-execute is what moves it.

Bundle size is a proxy metric. Nobody experiences kilobytes — they experience a page that does not respond to a tap. Worth keeping in view, because it is easy to spend a week removing 40KB that changed nothing anyone could feel.

That said, the work usually is worth doing, because the same few mistakes produce most of the weight.

Measure the right number

@next/bundle-analyzer or rollup-plugin-visualizer gives you a treemap. Before reading it, switch it to gzip or brotli sizes. Raw sizes lie: minified JavaScript compresses extremely well and highly repetitive code compresses better still, so raw numbers will point you at a dependency that costs a third of what the picture claims.

Then read the map with one question: is this in the initial bundle, and does the first screen need it? Most wins are not "this library is fat", they are "this is loaded on every page and used on one".

The classics, still worth checking

• A date library you barely use. moment is around 70KB gzipped with locales and cannot be tree-shaken. date-fns imports per function; Intl.DateTimeFormat is built into the browser and formats better than most of what people install.
• A whole icon set. Importing from the package root can pull in thousands of components. Import the specific icons, and check the treemap afterwards to confirm it worked.
• lodash instead of lodash-es. The CommonJS build cannot be tree-shaken. Half of what people use it for is now language built-ins.
• Two libraries doing one job — a chart library on one page and a different one on another, two toast libraries, three ways of making a request.

The subtle one: barrel files

This is the pattern that quietly costs the most, because it looks like good hygiene:

// src/components/index.ts
export * from "./Button";
export * from "./Chart";      // pulls in a charting library
export * from "./Editor";     // pulls in a code editor

import { Button } from "@/components";   // innocent-looking

The bundler must evaluate the entire barrel to resolve one name. Modern bundlers can sometimes shake it out, but any module with a side effect anywhere in that graph — a CSS import, a polyfill, a window touch at module scope — pins it, and now every page importing a Button ships a code editor.

Two fixes: import from the file directly, and set "sideEffects": false in package.json (or list the genuinely effectful files) so the bundler is allowed to drop unused branches.

Splitting, but not everywhere

React.lazy and dynamic import() are the right tool for anything not needed for the first paint:

const Editor = lazy(() => import("./Editor"));

<Suspense fallback={<EditorSkeleton />}>
  {isEditing && <Editor />}
</Suspense>

Good candidates: routes, modals, charts below the fold, anything behind a permission or a feature flag, rich editors, video players.

Bad candidates: components on the critical path, and anything small. Splitting everything replaces one large request with dozens of small ones and a waterfall of them, which is slower on a high-latency connection and much harder to reason about.

Match the fallback to the real layout. A spinner where a chart will appear causes a layout shift the moment it loads; a skeleton of the right dimensions does not.

Smaller is not the same as faster

The number users feel is Total Blocking Time — how long the main thread was too busy to respond. Bytes contribute to it, but so does what the code does on startup.

A 300KB bundle that renders and stops is a better experience than a 200KB one that hydrates a huge tree, runs six effects, and lays out a table of 5,000 rows. Once you have taken the easy weight off, look for:

• work at module scope, running on import whether or not it is needed
• effects that fire on mount and immediately fetch
• large lists rendered without virtualisation
• state at the top of the tree re-rendering everything below on every keystroke

What I would do, in order

1. Analyse with compressed sizes and look only at the initial chunk.
2. Fix imports — barrels, icon sets, lodash-es, per-function date imports.
3. Split routes and genuinely optional UI, with correctly sized fallbacks.
4. Set a budget in CI so the size cannot creep back:

{
  "budgets": [{ "type": "bundle", "name": "main", "maximumWarning": "180kb" }]
}

1. Then measure Total Blocking Time and go after the runtime work, which is usually where the remaining experience gap lives.

Step four matters more than any single deletion. Bundles do not grow because of one bad decision; they grow by ten kilobytes a sprint, and only a number that fails the build reliably notices.

~/keep-reading

• 7 min readWeb Workers, and the React jank they actually fixMoving work off the main thread only helps if the main thread was the problem. How to tell, what the structured-clone tax costs you, and the transfer that makes workers worth it.
• 7 min read60fps live meters in React without re-rendering the treeStreaming telemetry into a React UI at 60fps: why setState per frame is the wrong tool, and how a ring buffer plus a direct canvas write keeps the component tree still.
• 8 min readReal-Time Telemetry: Why Polling Lies, and WebSockets Don'tPolling dashboards lie between ticks — I learned that the hard way. Now I push telemetry over WebSockets for sub-second parity across every React client.

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Originally published at yaseenkhatib.streamerosai.com/blog/shrinking-react-bundles-what-actually-works/.