My pals in BBC World Service have been doing some awesome work on “lite” versions of their news articles (other page types to follow). They essentially skip the Server-Side React hydration which means you end up with a simpler HTML+CSS page, no JS. Page sizes drop significantly:
- Transferred: ~600KB -> 30KB
- Total: 1.65MB -> 135KB
Just append
.liteon a URL e.g. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/crgyyvdz1dro.lite There’s no on/off UX at the moment but they’re working on that too. #WebDev #WebPerf #WebPerformance #BBC
On first impression I think I might ideally have used a query parameter instead, leaving the URL path unmodified. I think that might work better for search engines, archivers, and link aggregators like Lemmy. But no one seems to do it that way, and front-end isn’t my bag, so what do I know.