Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight • Hacker News Board

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#41

Post by kitd » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

alex_suzuki wrote: post #27

jorisw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They feel the slowness of the page load

Not on their iPhones operating over 5G or the corporate WiFi.

Read the article. Typical users had old browsers often with poor reception. One user was using a PlayStation Portable which had very limited WWW capability.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#42

Post by tele_ski » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

pegasus wrote: post #36

wmanley wrote: post #25

The counterargument: In Defence of the Single Page Application: https://williamkennedy.ninja/javascript/2022/05/03/in-defenc...

All I got is a "loading" animation. Gave up after 10 seconds. So, not a counterargument, but a confirmation of the article's thesis.

It's a joke/sarcasm

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#43

Post by melon_tsui » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

Interesting they went with Astro.Makes sense for a form-heavy site. No JS until you need it,and it handles page transitions cleanly.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#44

Post by yCombLinks » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #9

I was a little confused by "doubled our users" since that's more about inbound traffic than site experience. I guess it's really shorthand for "halved form abandonment" which is still pretty great.

Users visited the site and couldn't even begin the form, nor get seen as a visitor, due to javascript metrics and rendering failing.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#45

Post by TSiege » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

entropichorse wrote: post #3

People who built a crappy website using React are just as likely to build a crappy website using Astro, HTML-first approach or any other technology

with this logic, why discuss any technology?

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#46

Post by kijin » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

brianwmunz wrote: post #26

Maybe this is heretical in today's AI hype climate but...weirdly due to the rise of AI, then AI-slop polluting everything, a lot of old fundamentals are coming back. Clear, well-structured, descriptive content on a well-built page has a better shot of being picked up for SEO/AEO/whatever which are the same best practices from 2005. A lot of these tips and tricks and hacks just aren't going to move the needle as much…

SEO and accessibility laws have always been the most effective way to convince someone to build clean, well-structured webpages. Guess what, both are measures of how easy it is for a machine to extract content from your pages. AI is just the latest machine that wants to slurp up your soup of tags.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#47

Post by masa-kozu » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

Designing for failure modes (bad network, old devices, no JS) often leads to better systems even in the happy path. This is a good case study of that.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#48

Post by conductr » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

romanovcode wrote: post #14

[flagged]

Idk, the general javascript spinner situation is beyond normalized at this point. I think mainly driven by React and other large/overkill JS frameworks. I avoid JS/TS heavy stuff so I don't really know but that's largely the impression I get. The whole thing reminds me of dialup era internet were we all were watching progressive JPGs load on a slow connection despite the fact I have fiber. I can't believe anyone is Ok with that UX, I don't see how any framework choice justifies introducing that type of behavior.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#49

Post by HumblyTossed » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

ungreased0675 wrote: post #18

Empathy and respect for users is what product managers should be doing. Shipping tens of megabytes per web page is impolite, if not outright disrespectful to users.

"If our users can't afford the bits, we don't need them!"

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#50

Post by faangguyindia » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

Most of my apps are now simply HTMX + Go + SQLite.

I've found it's enough for most projects.

One of my sites is image heavy and serves 10 TB of traffic per month. For this, I use the following setup:

1. S3 (I wanted reliable data storage) 2. In front of it, I have Cloudflare (with Tiered Cache enabled, which makes POPs prefer pulling from Cloudflare rather than the origin). I've set rules to cache everything on both the browser and Cloudflare for 1 year, ignore origin cache policies, ignore query strings, etc., and I simply use immutable objects that require revisioning. 3. BunnyCDN in front

Cloudflare will not let you run an image heavy site on its own, so I use this approach to massively cut the bills. Their policy says you cannot use it primarily for images; it must be used for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other site content.

And if you run only S3, the bills will be huge.

But yes, lately I’ve been building mobile apps. PWAs are limited; the OS can evict IndexedDB storage, so I cannot offer people reliable data storage in the app without sign up or involving a backend.

What can I do? So I was forced to switch to Flutter on Android, but I ran into another pain point: app updates sometimes spend a lot of time "under review," which is frustrating. For the same app, I maintain a web app that is very quick to update by comparison.

I wonder why there isn't a mobile OS that simply lets you build apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and gives you reliable storage without all this effort.

I like how quickly you can update PWA app.