From embarrassing 30s to consistent 90s on Lighthouse - this is the story of performance optimization gone wrong, then right. What started as a typical modern web stack became a journey of unlearning, where an accidental JavaScript-free deploy revealed that sometimes less is more.
I started developing websites in the mid-90’s, and shipped my first commercial one in '99. I didn’t really have JavaScript (As we know it today) - it was a fancy client-side ‘make-funky-things-happen’ enabler, not a ‘make-the-whole-page-work’ enabler. I’ve always looked at frameworks as something that’s useful to solve specific problems - Google Mail couldn’t be made without a framework. A web forum? It might help. A regular website? Doesn’t need it.
You don’t need an SPA to render any of the marketing, sales or other websites. Most webshops don’t need an SPA, just some light basket handling and data rendering and caching. But say that to any modern web dev, and you’re looked at as though you’ve got three heads, while they ship a page that’s multiple megabytes of JS to layout some text and prettify some pictures.
I started developing websites in the mid-90’s, and shipped my first commercial one in '99. I didn’t really have JavaScript (As we know it today) - it was a fancy client-side ‘make-funky-things-happen’ enabler, not a ‘make-the-whole-page-work’ enabler. I’ve always looked at frameworks as something that’s useful to solve specific problems - Google Mail couldn’t be made without a framework. A web forum? It might help. A regular website? Doesn’t need it.
You don’t need an SPA to render any of the marketing, sales or other websites. Most webshops don’t need an SPA, just some light basket handling and data rendering and caching. But say that to any modern web dev, and you’re looked at as though you’ve got three heads, while they ship a page that’s multiple megabytes of JS to layout some text and prettify some pictures.
I’m a modern web dev and I completely agree with you. Too much unnecessary JavaScript these days.