What the counter weighs
Every provider calls itself lightweight; hardly any names a number. Here are the numbers, and below them how to measure them yourself.
Measured on 2026-08-15: 473 designs, each fetched once over HTTPS, with gzip, the way a browser does it.
Two ways, two weights
As HTML the creator gives you a script; the Markdown and BBCode versions give you 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 | 4,558 B |
| Script (HTML) - every later one | 2 requests | 804 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.
What the individual designs weigh
Over the wire, with gzip. If you have to count bytes, 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 | 618 B |
| Digital | 10 | 505 B | 563 B | 746 B |
| Futuristic · calm | 10 | 504 B | 580 B | 704 B |
| With chart | 10 | 551 B | 605 B | 666 B |
| Retro | 10 | 530 B | 615 B | 734 B |
| Animated · building up | 10 | 610 B | 664 B | 768 B |
| Statistics panels (vector) | 10 | 566 B | 672 B | 715 B |
| Futuristic | 34 | 500 B | 697 B | 1,082 B |
| Unexpected | 10 | 566 B | 719 B | 918 B |
| Animated · with weight | 10 | 667 B | 736 B | 901 B |
| Hotel and holiday | 20 | 724 B | 769 B | 971 B |
| Futuristic · in motion | 10 | 681 B | 771 B | 864 B |
| Magazines and blogs | 20 | 720 B | 775 B | 848 B |
| School | 10 | 739 B | 784 B | 906 B |
| Internet | 10 | 647 B | 786 B | 844 B |
| Clothing and style | 20 | 703 B | 789 B | 896 B |
| Music | 10 | 690 B | 789 B | 964 B |
| Nerd culture | 10 | 666 B | 815 B | 909 B |
| Food and drink | 20 | 690 B | 820 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 | 1,061 B |
| Compact | 2 | 932 B | 1,319 B | 1,319 B |
| Counter strips | 100 | 375 B | 1,932 B | 3,037 B |
| Flag counters (vector) | 8 | 2,463 B | 2,549 B | 2,624 B |
| Breakdowns | 3 | 2,462 B | 2,558 B | 2,693 B |
| Flag counters | 9 | 4,297 B | 5,464 B | 7,093 B |
| Statistics panels | 8 | 582 B | 6,991 B | 17 kB |
| With trend chart | 5 | 1,689 B | 7,345 B | 7,747 B |
| World map | 14 | 3,571 B | 12 kB | 114 kB |
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. If you want a map, take one from the "maps" row with a small number.
If stats4u.net is slow or down
Then one image is missing from your 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 your site into its own outage – this one cannot.
What you do not have to count
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 69 ms on average, and under 85 ms in nine cases out of ten.
Measure it yourself
Replace 1 with your number and 950 with your 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