Your SVGs Are Probably 10x Bigger Than They Need to Be

I exported an icon from Figma last week. The SVG was 14KB. After optimization, it was 1.2KB. Same visual output, 91% smaller. This is not unusual. Design tools embed metadata, use excessive precision, include redundant groups, and output verbose path data that inflates file size dramatically. When you have one icon, 13KB of waste does not matter. When you have 50 icons inline in your HTML, that is 650KB of unnecessary markup being parsed on every page load. What makes SVGs bloated Editor metadata. Illustrator, Figma, Sketch, and Inkscape all embed their own metadata. Illustrator adds <!-- Generator: Adobe Illustrator 27.0 --> comments, proprietary namespaces like xmlns:x , and processing instructions. None of this is needed for rendering. Excessive decimal precision. A path point at x="142.38472947" renders identically to x="142.38" . Design tools often output 8-10 decimal places. For most SVGs, 2 decimal places is sufficient. On a complex illustration with 500 path points, trimming 6