Performance and page speed are critically important and criminally
ignored.
John Allsopp’s recent ‘Website Obesity’
talk reminds us of this painful fact.
Here are some facts about the webpage you’re viewing:
- Content, CSS, and JS — with the exception of Google Analytics — are
roughly 30KB combined, before minification. This is pretty fast for a
contemporary website.
- The webpage loads and draws pretty much instantaneously.
- I thought long and hard before putting the Google Analytics script
on the page. [and if anyone knows something smaller and faster than
Google Analytics for simple pageview tracking, I am all ears.]
- There are some heavier fonts, but through Font Subsetting, I have reduced the
over-network weight of those to be reasonably small as well.
- I have a number of transformations that I use to take the content
[written in markdown] and ‘publish’ it, but I don’t force those on
visitors’ devices. As a visitor, you just get the content that you are
expecting to read and the styling that makes it look decent.
- The CSS was written to be very much “themeable”. Unique “themes” are
each a couple of hundred bytes of unminified CSS.
If you are interested in the code behind this site, it is on GitHub.