What the counter weighs
Every provider calls itself lightweight; hardly any names a number. Here are the numbers, and below them the command that reproduces them.
Measured on 2026-09-06: 580 designs, each fetched once over HTTPS, with gzip, the way a browser does it.
Two ways, two weights
As HTML the creator emits a script; the Markdown and BBCode versions emit an image. The script can refresh the counter by itself, the image cannot – in exchange it is a single request.
| Image (Markdown, BBCode, HTML) | 1 request | 797 B |
|---|---|---|
| Script (HTML) - first visit | 3 requests | 9,598 B |
| Script (HTML) - every later one | 2 requests | 810 B |
s4u.js stays in the browser cache for a week, so it drops out on the second visit. The counter image itself is never cached – it is supposed to count.
16 designs can carry both versions in one image: the fifteen with a genuine dark twin, and the configurable counter. For those it is 751 B instead of 578 B, and the visitor's browser picks.
What the individual designs weigh
Over the wire, with gzip. Where every byte counts, the light families hold designs under half a kilobyte.
| Family | Designs | lightest | middle | heaviest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No visible counter | 2 | 169 B | 323 B | 323 B |
| New · Modern | 38 | 449 B | 561 B | 643 B |
| Digital | 10 | 504 B | 563 B | 746 B |
| Futuristic · calm | 10 | 504 B | 580 B | 705 B |
| Picture strips | 10 | 523 B | 596 B | 872 B |
| With chart | 10 | 551 B | 604 B | 666 B |
| Tiny counters | 10 | 358 B | 606 B | 740 B |
| Retro | 10 | 530 B | 615 B | 731 B |
| Animated · building up | 10 | 610 B | 664 B | 768 B |
| Statistics panels (vector) | 10 | 567 B | 673 B | 715 B |
| Moments and records (vector) | 16 | 516 B | 693 B | 1,858 B |
| Futuristic | 34 | 500 B | 696 B | 1,082 B |
| Unexpected | 10 | 566 B | 720 B | 918 B |
| Animated · with weight | 10 | 667 B | 736 B | 901 B |
| Handwriting and sketch (vector) | 6 | 721 B | 759 B | 826 B |
| Hotel and holiday | 20 | 724 B | 767 B | 971 B |
| Futuristic · in motion | 10 | 681 B | 773 B | 864 B |
| Magazines and blogs | 20 | 720 B | 775 B | 848 B |
| School | 10 | 739 B | 784 B | 906 B |
| Internet | 10 | 646 B | 786 B | 844 B |
| Music | 10 | 691 B | 788 B | 964 B |
| Clothing and style | 20 | 703 B | 790 B | 896 B |
| Sport and fitness | 10 | 658 B | 793 B | 934 B |
| Holidays and seasons | 10 | 710 B | 809 B | 948 B |
| Nerd culture | 10 | 666 B | 815 B | 908 B |
| Origin and rhythm (vector) | 14 | 544 B | 818 B | 2,070 B |
| Food and drink | 20 | 691 B | 821 B | 968 B |
| Flowers | 10 | 754 B | 829 B | 1,036 B |
| Christian motifs | 10 | 644 B | 837 B | 948 B |
| Space | 10 | 750 B | 857 B | 991 B |
| Animals | 10 | 751 B | 858 B | 1,062 B |
| Stamp and seal (vector) | 4 | 773 B | 912 B | 913 B |
| Glowing digits (vector) | 4 | 857 B | 1,191 B | 1,194 B |
| Compact | 2 | 953 B | 1,547 B | 1,547 B |
| Counter strips | 100 | 401 B | 1,952 B | 2,851 B |
| Breakdowns | 3 | 2,462 B | 2,557 B | 2,693 B |
| Flag counters (vector) | 20 | 2,463 B | 2,880 B | 3,204 B |
| World map | 21 | 1,972 B | 4,085 B | 114 kB |
| Flag counters | 9 | 4,216 B | 5,429 B | 7,150 B |
| Statistics panels | 8 | 580 B | 6,985 B | 17 kB |
| With trend chart | 5 | 1,721 B | 7,220 B | 7,747 B |
| Year cycle and set (vector) | 4 | 850 B | 8,445 B | 8,451 B |
The outliers
The heaviest design is World map (#31) at 114 kB – a world map as a bitmap from 2006. The newer maps come to a tenth of that. A map from the "maps" row with a small number is the light choice.
If stats4u.net is slow or down
Then one image is missing from the embedding page, and nothing else. Neither the image nor the script blocks rendering: the script carries async, the image is an image. An analytics script that halts page construction can drag the embedding site into its own outage – this one cannot.
What does not have to be counted
No cookie – measured, no Set-Cookie header in any of the three replies. No web font, no stylesheet, no further provider. Server time for one counter image is 208 ms on average, and under 614 ms in nine cases out of ten.
Measuring it again
Here 1 stands for the counter number and 950 for the design. The figure after "size_download" is what goes over the wire.
curl -s -o /dev/null -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip' \
-w '%{size_download} Bytes\n' \
https://www.stats4u.net/c/1-950.png