10 things I learned making the fastest site in the world

Great writeup by David Gilbertson on creating this super fast loading website.

1. Try not to make a slow site
2. Do mobile first. Like, really do it.
3. Be a benchmark hussy
4. Client Side Rendering is expensive
5. Don’t server-render HTML
6. Inline stuff, probably
7. Preload, then load
8. Reward good behaviour
9. Service workers: like me in high school (cool and easy)
10. Computers have nice fonts

The list contains some stuff that is common sense when you read it, but that we – or at least I – don’t actually do all the time. Take “Mobile First” for example:

For this project I actually did real mobile first. That is, developed the site with it running on a mobile device. I did this first, and when I was satisfied with the UI and the performance, I went about getting it to work on a big computer.

You’d be surprised how easy it is to get a fast site to run on a fast machine!

Also contains some great tips:

When you do your benchmarking, you should use the Chrome DevTools and throttle your CPU and network. I use a 10x CPU slowdown and set the network to “Good 3G”. I know that’s maybe not quite as slow as the average phone, but I don’t want to get so frustrated with slow speeds that I get out of the habit of really doing this.

And oh, very humorous too 🙂

10 things I learned making the fastest site in the world →