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How we improved our website's performance

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: How we improved our website's performance

#71
Snarky TLDR: half the JS load time was ad scripts. IMO Most of the performance increase was around specifying image heights, using facades for third party embeds, and optimizing around ad and analytics scripts.

Nice write up but not a big surprise to anyone that blocks analytics tracking, ads, and third party embeds.

Re: How we improved our website's performance

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But with 8kb zipped (I assume that following pages aren't that much worse) why should one optimize with a solution that adds that much complexity? If that's the argument, why not just let them take the (tiny) initial 8kb hit as an external css file, and make the rest of the experience even "zippier"?

I would believe that 8k via an additional request would harm performance more than to inline it. But haven't tested that yet.

It would most certainly marginally harm performance a single time, but every additional page load would be much improved.

Re: How we improved our website's performance

#73
post #37

key takeaways: - fonts can be unnecessarily huge - monolithic js = slow. Chunk at build time. - content-visibility: auto for lazy rendering

Chunking JS just leads to massive latency issues as the client is forced to download dozens (or hundreds) of "efficiently" chunked JS files. The e-commerce platform Magento 2 is packed with this kind of bullshit and is part of the reason my colleagues and I abandoned it for our clients' large e-commerce websites: https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/104583/magento-2... https://old.reddit.com/r/Magento/comments…

It seems though that in your example, all of the files being loaded are necessary on first load, and the total quantity is huge. Would the problems still be present if less JavaScript was depended upon on first load?

Re: How we improved our website's performance

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you create the screenshot SVG and other SVGs?

SVG screenshots are documented here: https://www.checkbot.io/article/web-page-screenshots-with-sv... The main trick is to view your web app in a browser, print to PDF and then use Inkscape to auto convert from PDF -> SVG (with some caveats). Worst case you could recreate the screenshot from scratch in a vector editor. The SVG icons are licensed from https://icons8.com/ (recommended!).

Thank you. You have been tremendously helpful

Re: How we improved our website's performance

#75
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the point you're making. Mind elaborating?

There is a ridiculous number of moving parts, stacked on top of each other, interacting in unforeseeable ways to allow you to shoot yourself in the foot, and absolutely nothing is straightforward. OK, that basically describes any kind of software development, but web seems so much worse than anything else. And I say that as someone doing mainly Java backend development who's learned to live with the AbstractProxyFact…

Thanks! I appreciate the explanation.
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