Look at the homepages of Tim Berners-Lee, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Donald Knuth. All three together have 235 kB, less than one Google SERP. Images are optimized, most of the content is above the fold, and their pages were "responsive" two decades before responsive design became a thing. But they are all ugly. If the father of the WWW, the father of C++, and the father of computer algorithms were in an evening web development class, they would all get an F and be asked to do their homepages again.