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Discussion on: How we improved website performance by 24% with 3 unusual changes

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pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski • Edited

It looks like you could use some more webpack dynamic imports to modularize your output js/css further down - with http2 it should help a lot. Maybe even think about separating "shell" css from the details, and load details asynchronously. This could make a big difference in that big css.

If you are brave, play around with purgeCSS - Ive found it an amazing thing if it works :)

Also, doing metatag dns prefetch to your CDN domain could also speed things up - ssl handshakes can slow things up a bit.

It looks like your fonts have all the possible characters in them (19KB is pretty big) - you might want to check out this article - florianbrinkmann.com/en/glyphhange... - i found this recipe to work wonders on fonts i used in one project:
before: 19KB
after: 5KB

Additionally, instead of loading them in the main CSS, inlining them into <style> in body, makes the request starts earlier, hence minimizing FOUT.

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pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski

Also, normally i wouldnt even mention this, but i think this is one of those rare cases where looking at the DOM depth and size could be a good investment if you look into performance issues.

Im a big fan of svg, but im not entirely sure that copying whole SVG tree every time its needed on the map is the way to go - if there is a big DOM tree with a depth, light png might be first easy step to make it a little bit shallower. But its very possible that with react and all that, its possible that your wiggle room will be small.

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swissgreg profile image
SwissGreg

Hey Paweł,

Thank you for the detailed suggestions, appreciate a lot!

Addressing your points:

  1. We are using Create-React-App, not sure if it supports dynamic imports without a custom webpack config, will have a look.
  2. Gonna try purgeCSS, looks like fun :)
  3. Already doing DNS-prefetch.
  4. I thought that the fonts are already optimized - we use something like: nunito-latin which should already be stripped down to only latin characters - or is it possible to go further?
  5. Good point, will look into unnecessary DOM elements.
  6. What do you mean exactly with the SVG tree copying?
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pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski

Fonts: ouh yeah, you can strip it down to characters you need - its very effective.

SVG - inlined svg is just a bunch of xml tags, so for 20 (even the same icons) your dom has 20x copy of that xml structure. I presume tiny png would be much flatter and i saw that you dont zoom/animate/manipulate icons on the map, so its less of a sin to migrate. Second option (probably better) would be to use svg symbols and use tag, to not duplicate the tree.