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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

IMHO instead of going for compressing/minifying/whatever else, it is far better to just remove the useless cruft in the first place --- and then you can still apply such techniques to whatever is left to squeeze out a bit more improvement. The best way to make your site ultra-responsive is to cut out all the bloat.

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> The best way to make your site ultra-responsive is to cut out all the bloat.

And if the site doesn't do it, you can often decrease page load time by turning on your browser's built-in tracking protection:

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/tracking-protection-always-...

It's a bit sad that blocking trackers can cut page load time in half but that is unfortunately the web we have.

This is mostly about tuning for performance for SEO - its amazing in 2018 that sites are delivered with unoptimized images - its not rocket science to use Photoshop or run all the images through a cli based tool.

Agencies are only concerned with speed of putting content online and don't have time for that. Mom and pop, 80% of the internet, are only concerned with getting content online and haven't a clue what anyone is talking about cause they leave that up to their high school age kid for that.

Designers have become "coders" but aren't versed in the area of the science of computers and networking. Thus we have given to us Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace where you, too, can become an internet web site developer!

This part is like always missing from such presentations. First point always should be remove as much as possible.

You're totally right, but unfortunately, I think that's because the person writing these types of presentations don't have control over the content or design of the website, so removing stuff is often impossible or way more work that these tips.

The core holdback for slow websites is usually political, not technical or lack of skill. These presentations usually just try to make the best of those team dynamics issues.

It reminds me of "reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order". It's better to reduce resource consumption than to reduce its impact.

Exactly. The weird thing is that you don't have to loose that JS advantages if you pull out an old school technique called progressive enhancement. If you mix that with a strict no-js first design you will achieve performance that no ultra optimised "dynamic" style can compete with.

I have noticed a lot more landing pages using gradients/plain backgrounds instead of a big hero image.

Truth be told, I love big hero images amd especially videos. However, they're the largest performance problem on my otherwise text-based website, and they're purely aesthetic.

"Removing useless cruft" doesn't seem very practical, did it often work for you? In my experience, erring on the side of making existing stuff work faster is better than removing non-critical features.

> and then you can still apply such techniques to whatever is left to squeeze out a bit more improvement

Yes, like "compressing/minifying/whatever else", which is the subject of this presentation.

What's next? Really, before minifying, you have to get a server to serve anything in the first place. And register a domain name. And, hmmm, well first you need to buy a computer and plug it in...

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