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

tonsky.me

101–110 of 225 posts

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

#101

>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…

I’ve yet to find an AMP page that downloads less than 1MB of crap for what edsentially id a dtatic text page (sometimes with images).

1 MB is incredibly compact by news site standards.

Try a random article page like https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/tech/australia-encryption...

I refreshed a few times, scrolling to the bottom of the page each time. According to Chrome dev tools even without a video playing between 6 MB and 21 MB was transferred just for me to scroll to the bottom of the page.

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

#102

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…

Very fast indeed. Hard work paid off!

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

#103

>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…

Except it does so in a rather poor way: * It's clearly driven by a biased entity (Google) * It doesn't actually directly prioritize page speed * It breaks websites

> nonbiased entity (Google)

You probably meant it the other way round?

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

#104
post #74
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if more web developers understood how browsers actually render a page we'd get much better web pages. In the case of CSS, the browser won't render until all the CSS files are loaded and parsed. Having lots of them is terrible for time-to-first-paint performance. That's reason enough to inline styles in the head and only have one CSS link on a page if you want something simple, or to use media queries in links…

Ok, except the advice has been to move CSS to files for a long time, so that they can be cached easily. That way other pages are loaded quickly, since they css file is already stored on the device.

Caching is still important, but there's no point in designing a good caching strategy if the user's very first impression of the site is poor - if they don't come back then they won't benefit from caching. If you use the more advanced media query links mentioned in the article you get the benefits of a minimal first load and the benefits of caching.

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

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it does so in a rather poor way: * It's clearly driven by a biased entity (Google) * It doesn't actually directly prioritize page speed * It breaks websites

> nonbiased entity (Google) You probably meant it the other way round?

Fixed, thanks.

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

#106

>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…

I’ve yet to find an AMP page that downloads less than 1MB of crap for what edsentially id a dtatic text page (sometimes with images).

The AMP Project site itself is ~500kb.

https://www.ampproject.org/ (desktop version is AMP-ified too).

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

#107
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.

> But you do need "PWA" if you want your site to work offline.

The author addresses this point quoting the examples of the most popular apps where offline mode doesn't make sense as their whole point is to facilitate online communication (booking, chatting, dating, social interaction etc.).

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are taking about policy here. The article is talking about technical implementation.

Yes in that sense AMP is a business contact rather than a technical innovation. "Follow these rules and we'll tell users that we think your site is fast and maybe prioritise it in search results". That's why you can't have a fast news site without it - because new site owners won't follow the rules needed to make their site fast unless they get something in return other than speed. Only AMP gives that. If Google base…

> If Google based is lightning bolt etc. on measured page speed instead then yes you might not need AMP. But they don't.

But they do?

https://searchengineland.com/google-speed-update-page-speed-...

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

#109
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.

> But you do need "PWA" if you want your site to work offline. The author addresses this point quoting the examples of the most popular apps where offline mode doesn't make sense as their whole point is to facilitate online communication (booking, chatting, dating, social interaction etc.).

But in those examples, offline mode still makes a lot of sense. For example, looking up bookings when signal is bad (when on a train), or past multimedia messages within you chats etc etc.

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

#110

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…

No images without javascript? Imo js should be for functionality only, basic content should always load.
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