5 Methods to Reduce JavaScript Bundle Size

How to optimize your application by reducing bundle size

Chameera Dulanga
Bits and Pieces
Published in
6 min readOct 7, 2021

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Today, we use JavaScript heavily in web development, and we can find many applications with large bundle sizes. However, beyond a certain limit, it starts to affect the application performance.

In this article, I will discuss 5 techniques to reduce the JavaScript bundle size to avoid any performance bottlenecks.

1. Code Splitting with Webpack

Code splitting allows you to separate your code into bundles and load them on-demand.

There are multiple ways to implement code splitting using Webpack. Out of these, Dynamic Imports is one of the most used methods. With this approach, you can easily split your code depending on the routes used in the frontend.

Suppose you are building a new social media platform. Most of the time, users will interact with the news feed and their profile page. So, loading JavaScript for these two pages is sufficient at first, and load others on-demand.

If you are using Angular or React, code splitting is even easier since they support lazy loading by default.

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