Why Exported SVGs Are Often Bloated
SVG files exported from design tools (Illustrator, Figma, Sketch) frequently carry far more markup than the actual visible shapes require — editor-specific metadata, verbose XML namespaces, unused <defs> elements, excessive decimal precision on path coordinates, and human-readable whitespace/indentation all add real bytes with zero visual effect, since none of it changes what the rendered image actually looks like.
Optimizing an SVG means stripping this non-visual overhead — removing comments and metadata, collapsing unnecessary whitespace, and reducing excessive coordinate precision (a path point specified to 10 decimal places is rendering at a precision far beyond what any screen can actually display, wasting bytes for accuracy nobody can see) — while leaving the actual rendered output visually identical.
This matters directly for page weight and load performance: an icon set with dozens of SVGs each carrying redundant editor metadata adds up to real, avoidable bytes on every page load, especially compared to a genuinely minimal hand-optimized SVG achieving the identical visual result.