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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

#2
Well yeah but the author is missing the point: these tools allow your site to load faster than the theoretical limit without them.

AMP buys you Google's CDN and prefetching on Search.

And PWA buys you a 0 distance cache hit on your second visit, the ability to prefetch unvisited resources, and with the ability to update the cache in the background.

Not saying these aren't negligible on a 15MB site but they are tools for making an existing slow site appear faster which is what everyone who isn't a dev really wants.

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

#3
post #2

Well yeah but the author is missing the point: these tools allow your site to load faster than the theoretical limit without them. AMP buys you Google's CDN and prefetching on Search. And PWA buys you a 0 distance cache hit on your second visit, the ability to prefetch unvisited resources, and with the ability to update the cache in the background. Not saying these aren't negligible on a 15MB site but they are tools…

Right, but why is your site 15MB anyway?

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

#4
post #2

Well yeah but the author is missing the point: these tools allow your site to load faster than the theoretical limit without them. AMP buys you Google's CDN and prefetching on Search. And PWA buys you a 0 distance cache hit on your second visit, the ability to prefetch unvisited resources, and with the ability to update the cache in the background. Not saying these aren't negligible on a 15MB site but they are tools…

on a 15MB site

Good lord, friend. Why put your users through this to begin with?

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

#5
But you do need "PWA" if you want your site to work offline. PWAs were never really sold as something that would make your site's initial load time faster. Not really sure how the author got that impression.

It's almost like saying "you don't need jQuery to make your site faster" - to those who understand the purpose of jQuery, it's a bit of a nonsensical statement.

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

#6
Wikipedia is a static delivery website. Of course it’s easy if all you’re delivering is static content. Try that with an ecommerce site where dynamic information is sent from sometimes multiple sources. It’s better to load it once and have a reactive site call just the necessary apis after. Calling everything over and over again in eCommerce is a pain for users. Unless you can afford a database and servers to be distributed globally to counter the added latency of downloading everything again and again. PWA is the next step for that. But, yeah, ok, for Wikipedia you can be static as you want.

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

#7
post #5

But you do need "PWA" if you want your site to work offline. PWAs were never really sold as something that would make your site's initial load time faster. Not really sure how the author got that impression. It's almost like saying "you don't need jQuery to make your site faster" - to those who understand the purpose of jQuery, it's a bit of a nonsensical statement.

The author mentions that, and says there is a use case there, but suggests that most PWA's don't have any use when offline, so they are useless in lots of cases.

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

#8
post #4
post #2

Well yeah but the author is missing the point: these tools allow your site to load faster than the theoretical limit without them. AMP buys you Google's CDN and prefetching on Search. And PWA buys you a 0 distance cache hit on your second visit, the ability to prefetch unvisited resources, and with the ability to update the cache in the background. Not saying these aren't negligible on a 15MB site but they are tools…

on a 15MB site Good lord, friend. Why put your users through this to begin with?

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 standardise. I personally think it will be the most popular app delivery mechanism in the next few years, even on mobile devices.

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

#10

Wikipedia is a static delivery website. Of course it’s easy if all you’re delivering is static content. Try that with an ecommerce site where dynamic information is sent from sometimes multiple sources. It’s better to load it once and have a reactive site call just the necessary apis after. Calling everything over and over again in eCommerce is a pain for users. Unless you can afford a database and servers to be dist…

Unless you have a very active community commenting and interacting around the items, you can definitely go almost entirely static, even in ecommerce.

Regenerate pages after changes happen and you'll be fine. You'll still need dynamic search most likely, but even those can be pre-generated for many terms. (Your admin / content management part needs to be dynamic of course, but that's not customer-visible)

If your catalogue is so large that constant regeneration is impractical, you can generate on-demand and cache long-term a few layers above for anything not requested recently.

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