The Big S Web Design site has been rebuilt from the ground up.
What changed
The old site was hand-written PHP with a jQuery front end, and it had grown a few problems over the years. The stylesheet alone had reached 8.6 MB because every image had been base64-encoded into the CSS by a build step that no longer existed. Every visitor downloaded all of it before a single pixel appeared.
The new site is built with Astro and ships as plain static HTML. The results:
- Stylesheet: 8.6 MB → around 100 KB
- Images: 171 MB → 20 MB, with unused files and Photoshop sources removed
- Case-study animations: converted from animated GIF to MP4, roughly 90% smaller
- JavaScript: jQuery, Modernizr, Owl Carousel and WOW.js replaced with a few kilobytes of modern browser APIs
Why it matters
Site speed is part of what I sell. It would be a poor advert for my work if my own site were the slowest thing a prospective client loaded that day.
If you’d like the same treatment for your site, get in touch.