Sometimes I visit my own website , that I haven't really optimised for performance, to look something up and I'm like “damn, that was fast”, and then I remember why it's so fast: HTML only, no JS, minimal HTML, minimal CSS (yeah I know the design is meh), and optimised images. The homepage for example is less than 13KB 🔥.
I'm not bragging, just underlining that HTML-first SSGs like @eleventy or frameworks like @enhance_dev are very user friendly out of the box (they don't ship useless JS).
@matuzo @eleventy @enhance_dev
JS can enhance performance, if used to inject content only, avoiding sending common elements every time (menus, site maps...). In most web pages, the weight of the actual content is less than 50% of the actual HTML.
Of course, this improvement happens only if your users load more than one page. If they only see the home, it is worse.
Sadly, most of people includes so many libraries, and so big, that all those improvements go down the drain. CDNs are a cruft that really don't work.
But the real bloat in 90% of sites is advertising and tracking. It easily makes then 10x or bigger. Video ads should be illegal.
