Speeding Up Your Website

January 31, 2021

5 min read

Speeding Up Your Website

Table of Contents#

  1. Web Safe Fonts
  2. Font Display
  3. Unicode Ranges
  4. Preloading
  5. Google Fonts
  6. Images
  7. Using Alternative Packages
  8. Unused Dependencies
  9. Staying Up To Date With Dependencies
  10. Conclusion

Today, we will talk about techniques that I used to speed up my very own website. I was quite curious about what tricks people were using to optimize their blogs, portfolios to increase user experience. And, I'm wickedly obsessed when it comes to optimization. So I look further to see if there were any ways to optimize like reducing bundle sizes, optimizing google fonts, using different bundles for the development environment and production environment, tricks to utilize for custom fonts. Finally, here we're, on an optimized website. Let's first see the GTmetrix score.

gtmetrix-site-performance

As can be seen, there isn't much to squeeze out in terms of performance. Now, we will dissect these process step-by-step and see how to achieve a score like this.

Fonts#

Web Safe Fonts#

If you're aiming for the best you can get, do not even consider using anything but browsers Web Safe Fonts. By Web Safe Fonts I mean:

  • Arial (sans-serif)
  • Verdana (sans-serif)
  • Helvetica (sans-serif)
  • Tahoma (sans-serif)
  • Trebuchet MS (sans-serif)
  • Times New Roman (serif)
  • Georgia (serif)
  • Garamond (serif)
  • Courier New (monospace)
  • Brush Script MT (cursive)

These are highly accessible fonts pretty much for all the browsers since they already installed on your computer, so prioritize them over Google Web Fonts or Adobe Fonts.

Font Display#

@font-face {
  font-family: ExampleFont;
  src: url(/path/to/fonts/examplefont.woff) format('woff'), url(/path/to/fonts/examplefont.eot)
      format('eot');
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: optional;
  unicode-range: U+0020-007F, U+0100-017F;
}

font-display plays a huge role for Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and of course for the performance. So, best to go with optional for performance and swap for decrease CLS.

Unicode Ranges#

Specifying the unicode-ranges beforehand tells the browsers to only download necessary characters that going to be used. Since we don't need characters like Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, etc. Of course, if you are not using those characters 🙂.

Preloading#

<link
  href="/fonts/Avenir-Roman.ttf"
  as="font"
  type="font/ttf"
  rel="preload"
  crossorigin="anonymous"
/>

The preload means that you will need this font very soon after page loading, so load them first and then move onto others, before browsers' main rendering kicks in. Therefor, preload does not block the page's render and improves overall performance.

Google Fonts#

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" />
<link
  href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:wght@400;500;600;700&display=swap"
  rel="stylesheet"
/>

When using Google fonts always use preconnect first, the browser will start a new connection between origin and receiver to make things faster, thus improving our websites' user experience and speed. And, pick the font-weights you need because more font-weight means bigger file to download, so choose wisely.

Images#

There are not much to talk about images but always strive for smaller images you can get. For example, the image on my landing page is only 50kb, by the way, this is the smallest it can get.

Using Alternative Packages#

Since this websites runs on React only way to decrease the bundle size was to use Preact 3kB alternative for React. If you are using Webpack as a bundler like me, you can follow the steps to implement this. By the way, I'm using preact for production version.

  • First, install react yarn add preact
  • Then, configure your webpack bundler as shown below.
webpack: (config, { dev, isServer }) => {
    if (!dev && !isServer) {
      Object.assign(config.resolve.alias, {
        react: 'preact/compat',
        'react-dom/test-utils': 'preact/test-utils',
        'react-dom': 'preact/compat',
      });
    }
    return config;
  },

Apart from that example, you also analyze your packages through Google Lighthouse, which offers alternative smaller packages for current ones.

recommend-alternative-package

Unused Dependencies#

Look through your dependencies inside package.json, locate and delete unused ones. Because even if you don't use packages in package.json they will still be inside your final bundle, thus will make your bundle bigger, therefore make it load slower.

Staying Up To Date With Dependencies#

Staying up to date with the latest dependencies may seem unnecessary at first, but sometimes developers improve their packages in terms of both speed and size. For example, Next.js 10's core packages have been reduced by 16%. They introduced a code-splitting strategy. All these happened because they added their built-in Image component to the codebase. Before they have introduced this image component, I was using an external package to use images. I've omitted this one right away once I upgraded to Next.js 10.

Conclusion#

  • Use Web Safe Fonts.
  • Preload your font file.
  • Preconnect to Google Fonts.
  • Use font-display: optional or font-display: swap for performance and CLS.
  • Use only unicode-range you need.
  • Do not include font-weight you don't need to Google Fonts.
  • Compress your images.
  • Use smaller alternative packages for your production bundle, such as Preact.
  • Remove unused dependencies.
  • Stay up to date with dependencies.

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