I ended up using a static site generator for my personal site because I fucking hate JS and frameworks and WebComponents. The front page is 646 KB and it loads in 4 seconds. I’d love for it to be 1 second or less, but the fonts are a factor.
And I shrunk the shit out of that background too with pngcrush so miss me with that.
Haven’t done this type of optimizing in a long time, I had a quick look at the network graph for your front page (F12 dev tools in desktop browser), my understanding is it looks like you are getting blocked from loading additional resources (fonts + background) until your style sheets are fully read --pink line is document loaded i believe.
It may be worthwhile to experiment with adding some preload links to the html template? or output? like below and assessing if it makes things faster for you.
Honestly, 4 seconds is really slow, especially with static HTML. I built my first companies’ site myself, it includes a video on the front page and jquery, is built by PHP, and on descent Internet connections the front page will load in slightly over a second, other pages dip under that.
There are loads of tweaks you can make to -any- site, and total amount of bytes really isn’t the only speed factor here.
I gotta say I came in here to flex and I learned so much. I am going to roll some of these changes really soon once I find out where to best add them to my Hugo template. I’m going to reply to some of them below to clarify some things:
It may be worthwhile to experiment with adding some preload links to the html template? or output? like below and assessing if it makes things faster for you.
This is the most interesting because I didn’t even know this was possible with HTML5, so I want to add this right away.
I have a pixel 6 and notice some lag in scrolling. Could it be that you don’t use srcsets but instead huge screenshots no matter the device screen?
The background is a large image in the CSS via background-image, I don’t know how easy it would be to change it to a srcset but I will give it a shot
The fonts can be loaded from another file that ends in the cache, lowering load time next time.
At the very least they need to load last because they are the largest burden
Not that you’d want to because you hate JS and web components and all that, and there’s nothing wrong with your website, but NextJS supports Static Site generation.
So, JS and frameworks and webcomponents can get the job done for simple stuff nowadays. My portfolio page has a load time of 631 ms using the SSG built into NextJS, and its really similar to your website.
And how do you plan to manage your posts, database etc. and render stuff in those? You still need some backend solution like Wordpress, you can use vue as a frontend library for it… or vanilla JS, or jQuery…
So… you are aware that FastAPI and Flask will always be significantly slower than Wordpress… because Python, always running processes etc.?
You’re building a simple website / blog just use Wordpress, it will output most of the pages into plan simple and fast HTML, then add a few pieces of vanilla JS or Vue (if you’re into that) to make things “fluffier”. Why bother with constant XHR requests when you’re just serving simple text pages?
With Wordpress you’ll also get all the management, roles, permissions, backend for “free” and you can always, like sane people, cache the output of the most visited pages. Wordpress also provides a RESTful API if required.
I’m not sure if the possibility is there depending on your use case (eg.: you are exporting the fonts) nor if the cost of doing it would be worth the shot, but you can send minified versions variants of fonts, too.
I ended up using a static site generator for my personal site because I fucking hate JS and frameworks and WebComponents. The front page is 646 KB and it loads in 4 seconds. I’d love for it to be 1 second or less, but the fonts are a factor.
And I shrunk the shit out of that background too with pngcrush so miss me with that.
Haven’t done this type of optimizing in a long time, I had a quick look at the network graph for your front page (F12 dev tools in desktop browser), my understanding is it looks like you are getting blocked from loading additional resources (fonts + background) until your style sheets are fully read --pink line is document loaded i believe.
It may be worthwhile to experiment with adding some preload links to the html template? or output? like below and assessing if it makes things faster for you.
<link rel="preload" as="image" href="https://volcanolair.co/img/bg1-ultracompressed.webp" fetchpriority="high"><link rel="preload" as="font" href="https://volcanolair.co/fonts/Inter-Regular.woff2"><link rel="preload" as="font" href="https://volcanolair.co/fonts/Inter-Bold.woff2">Honestly, 4 seconds is really slow, especially with static HTML. I built my first companies’ site myself, it includes a video on the front page and jquery, is built by PHP, and on descent Internet connections the front page will load in slightly over a second, other pages dip under that.
There are loads of tweaks you can make to -any- site, and total amount of bytes really isn’t the only speed factor here.
I love all your replies.
You wouldn’t get these responses from stackoverflow.
This isn’t even a programming or development community…it’s a general interest one.
You didn’t even ask for help.
I gotta say I came in here to flex and I learned so much. I am going to roll some of these changes really soon once I find out where to best add them to my Hugo template. I’m going to reply to some of them below to clarify some things:
This is the most interesting because I didn’t even know this was possible with HTML5, so I want to add this right away.
The background is a large image in the CSS via background-image, I don’t know how easy it would be to change it to a srcset but I will give it a shot
At the very least they need to load last because they are the largest burden
Not that you’d want to because you hate JS and web components and all that, and there’s nothing wrong with your website, but NextJS supports Static Site generation.
So, JS and frameworks and webcomponents can get the job done for simple stuff nowadays. My portfolio page has a load time of 631 ms using the SSG built into NextJS, and its really similar to your website.
My front page is 613KB with Wordpress. Moral of the story, you don’t have to use a static website generator to have light things.
Can I achieve the same with vue.js or flutter? I need to learn this
Yes. You can. I have a personal site that is using nuxt static site mode and it renders extremely fast and clean output.
And how do you plan to manage your posts, database etc. and render stuff in those? You still need some backend solution like Wordpress, you can use vue as a frontend library for it… or vanilla JS, or jQuery…
Ah, for that I’ll just dump some fast API or flask thing. Vue or flutter will just handle the front end
So… you are aware that FastAPI and Flask will always be significantly slower than Wordpress… because Python, always running processes etc.?
You’re building a simple website / blog just use Wordpress, it will output most of the pages into plan simple and fast HTML, then add a few pieces of vanilla JS or Vue (if you’re into that) to make things “fluffier”. Why bother with constant XHR requests when you’re just serving simple text pages?
With Wordpress you’ll also get all the management, roles, permissions, backend for “free” and you can always, like sane people, cache the output of the most visited pages. Wordpress also provides a RESTful API if required.
No I mean, I wanna make a full project but without bloating the front end website
Check out https://250kb.club all performance sites focused on speed and small size.
Or maybe the 512kb.club a more reasonable balance between 250 club and the 1mb club.
Also with a view: jankfree.org for a similar focus on performance.
The entire Material Design framework in JS and Web Components in 80kb
https://clshortfuse.github.io/materialdesignweb/components/buttons.html
JS and Web Components are not the problem. Poor design is.
I’m not sure if the possibility is there depending on your use case (eg.: you are exporting the fonts) nor if the cost of doing it would be worth the shot, but you can send minified
versionsvariants of fonts, too.I have a pixel 6 and notice some lag in scrolling. Could it be that you don’t use srcsets but instead huge screenshots no matter the device screen?
The fonts can be loaded from another file that ends in the cache, lowering load time next time.
Loaded pretty much instantaneously on my phone (a second at most). Then again, I block third party fonts.