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Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

tonsky.me

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Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#131

Post by robinanil »

robinanil wrote: post #45
robinanil wrote: post #41

At Tock we had been obsessed with page load performance since the beginning and I agree with the author. We avoided PWA mostly due to it's broken behavior. Often times we are faster than loading the same restaurant page on Google search. Out challenge has been that we have to load a lot of images, so we spent a lot of time optimizing everything around it and optimizing everything around it. From TLS1.3 to the CDN, to…

Also ours is not a static page, it has dynamic content, and ga + fb tracking for our restaurants and we make it work by correctly prioritizing important rendering elements over other

We have also spent time reducing the initial JS parsing size by chunking out our ever growing JS bundle and we constantly test on slow devices on 2g/3g profiles to emulate bad internet conditions. We have learned a lot in the process probably good for a blog post

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#132

Post by C1sc0cat »

spiralganglion wrote: post #42
writepub wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While everything you note is true, it's hardly the fault of the engineers. One cannot expect engineers to hand code css and optimize every time. These things should be handled by tools. With the advent of css-in-js and compilers, this is slowly but surely happening. What amp did was prove at scale, and with tooling, that performance can be achieved. That philosophy is dripping into other tools.

In some cases, sure, it's not the fault of engineers — if an engineer is in an environment where they're not able to take the time to do things right. In some cases, it is the lack of tools. But I think it's often not either of those, and it is in fact the chosen priorities of the engineers. A lack of attention to craft. We see a similar split in GameDev. Some game developers (Carmack, Blow, Acton) sweat every millis…

I am afraid that a lot of web devs don't care about speed at all they just use the trendy frame work.

This is from direct experience working with many major brands to improve their sites - its not improving at all.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#133

Post by krageon »

oliwarner wrote: post #125
pandapower2 wrote: post #27

>I’m not saying practices promoted by AMP are bad or useless. They are good practices. But nothing stops you from following them in the regular web. Disagree. The most important feature of AMP is that it makes it impossible to add the kind of bloated crap that causes poor performance on something like a large media company website. Something like a news website likely has 2-4+ analytics integrations, and a similar nu…

This is nonsense. AMP pages can still track and advertise and use unlimited amounts of crap; it's just different syntax. TFA is just stating that you don't need handcuffs to behave well. You can optimise your site without AMP.

Except this doesn't happen in practice. We've already seen that in the wild. What is left to have a discussion about?

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#134

Post by deepakkarki »

It's true, that with static sites you're better off without any JS. It's pretty much how I've built https://discoverdev.io

It's powered by a home grown static site generator framework. Hosted on Netlify. Works fairly fast even random corners of India. But then I found my own generator limiting and surveyed existing frameworks - decided to go with Gatsby - a ReactJS based SSG. To my surprise Gatsby+Netlify worked much faster and smoother than my JS free solution! It's currently running at https://beta.discoverdev.io

Worth noting that Gatsby generates pure html+css during build time, and page renders fine without JS enabled. Seems to be a good balance between DevX and UX. :)

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#135

Post by youngtaff »

pandapower2 wrote: post #27

>I’m not saying practices promoted by AMP are bad or useless. They are good practices. But nothing stops you from following them in the regular web. Disagree. The most important feature of AMP is that it makes it impossible to add the kind of bloated crap that causes poor performance on something like a large media company website. Something like a news website likely has 2-4+ analytics integrations, and a similar nu…

But if there's no advertising where's the money going to come from to pay those developers?

Part of the third-party bloatware problem on the web is us, users who aren't willing to pay for content

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#136

Post by _eric »

deepakkarki wrote: post #134

It's true, that with static sites you're better off without any JS. It's pretty much how I've built https://discoverdev.io It's powered by a home grown static site generator framework. Hosted on Netlify. Works fairly fast even random corners of India. But then I found my own generator limiting and surveyed existing frameworks - decided to go with Gatsby - a ReactJS based SSG. To my surprise Gatsby+Netlify worked much…

Minor thing I noticed on your site: a clean load is requesting around 425kb of data, but your /assets/img/dd-logo.ico alone weighs 362kb. Same thing happens in your new site. Maybe it's something to look into, reducing the size of it should make your site even faster.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#137

Post by mcintyre1994 »

Moru wrote: post #90
craftyguy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, the 'trick' is to discard javascript. You can build a functional website without it.

If you really want you can build a very fast site if you only download the part of the html that change between loads and still not break the back button. This is more work though.

Is this what NextJS does? I assume you couldn't do that without Javascript either way right?

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#138

Post by nmca »

cheeaun wrote: post #39

The footnotes mentioned: > By the way, since you first opened this article my ServiceWorker has downloaded XXX Mb of useless data in background. I hope you are on WiFi :) But the code doesn't really download anything. It stores the intial datetime your first load the page, and diff to the current time, convert it to "bytes" every second.

Yeah I was pissed off about this, then very amused when I checked. I think his point is, that's what news sites often do on your phone!

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#139

Post by deepakkarki »

_eric wrote: post #136
deepakkarki wrote: post #134

It's true, that with static sites you're better off without any JS. It's pretty much how I've built https://discoverdev.io It's powered by a home grown static site generator framework. Hosted on Netlify. Works fairly fast even random corners of India. But then I found my own generator limiting and surveyed existing frameworks - decided to go with Gatsby - a ReactJS based SSG. To my surprise Gatsby+Netlify worked much…

Minor thing I noticed on your site: a clean load is requesting around 425kb of data, but your /assets/img/dd-logo.ico alone weighs 362kb. Same thing happens in your new site. Maybe it's something to look into, reducing the size of it should make your site even faster.

Oh thanks, I didn't notice :)

I guess I can compress a lot further, given it should be a tiny (34x34?) image anyway!

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#140

Post by ForHackernews »

dvtrn wrote: post #14
osrec wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's just a website, then I agree that is indeed excessive. If, however, it's 15mb of useful functionality (perhaps an app that lets you edit and encode video), then in my eyes, it's acceptable, and probably a good candidate to be a PWA. I know a lot of people hate the idea of doing everything in the browser, but seriously, it's the one ubiquitous platform that we have, which even competing entities have agreed to…

If, however, it's 15mb of useful functionality (perhaps an app that lets you edit and encode video), then in my eyes, it's acceptable You either have an abundance of high speed internet access, or benefit from internet usage that isn't metered by the amount of data consumed, or both. Functionality or not, heavy web experiences leave out a lot of people who would otherwise be willing and capable users of %product% if…

Why would you not just edit and encode video locally, with an actual installed program?

Everyone with a computer produced after 2010 has the equivalent of late-90s supercomputer, and we were doing video editing on desktops in the 90s!

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