Performance
Why your site crawls on hotel wifi, and the four fixes that work
Latency ruins a page long before bandwidth does. Ship these four changes and most sites feel instant again by the next deploy.
Tag
caching
Headers, CDNs and revalidation. The cheapest performance work on the list, and the easiest to get subtly wrong.
5 posts1 authorLast post 3 months ago
Deep dives
Cache headers, CDNs, and stale-while-revalidate
One header turns a cold cache into an instant page for roughly a third of visits, and it costs nothing to ship. What it does, and where it quietly breaks.
Guides
Service workers: the three lines worth having
Most service worker code is a caching library nobody asked for. A small one is genuinely useful.
Performance
Compression: brotli, gzip and the flags nobody sets
Brotli at its default level is barely better than gzip. At level 11 for static files it is a different story.
Deep dives
Inside the HTTP cache: a request’s whole journey
Memory cache, disk cache, service worker, CDN, origin. Five places a response can come from, and they disagree more often than you would like.