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You'll be surprised how much faster pages feel without ad scripts - I noticed significant improvements after implementing a no-ads premium option on our website

by r1ch 10y ago

You'll be surprised how much faster pages feel without ad scripts - I noticed significant improvements after implementing a no-ads premium option on our website. Even with an ad blocker, things just feel snappier if the scripts simply aren't there in the first place. I decided to go one step further with my personal site and eliminate all JS completely. I don't get enough traffic to make any kind of analytics or ad code worthwhile.

brianwawok 10y ago
The anti SPA. Love it. I don't really browse on my phone because the JS situation is so bad.
K0nserv 10y ago
Me too, I used to spend a fair amount of time looking at the tiny amount of traffic I got in GA. But just like you I decided the extra JS wasn't worth it and I'd rather have my website be completely void of JS even if that meant I'd loose visibility from not having GA. Cloudflare's analytics is good enough for me. As a result of being strict about JS and keeping the CSS down my website is super snappy and tiny.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
Same for me. I make money when people hire me as a consultant or buy my books. I started recently rewriting my sites as simple static content (and wrote about how I do this http://blog.markwatson.com/2016/12/benefits-of-static-web-sites-hosted-on.html http://blog.markwatson.com/2016/12/benefits-of-static-web-si...) I still have JS from bootstrap, and I am looking at bootstrap alternatives that are CSS only.
StavrosK 10y ago
> I don't get enough traffic to make any kind of analytics or ad code worthwhile. On a related note, does anyone else see GA being wildly inaccurate? My blog was on the HN front page a while ago, and CloudFront got ~600k hits, which should translate to about ~100k uniques (I cache), yet GA only showed 8k uniques. I'm guessing the HN crowd runs uBlock or some other blocker in its vast majority, so JS-based analytics are completely untrustworthy.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  In your case, what does GA do, that something reading Cloudfront logs couldn't do?
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Only two or three files are served from Cloudfront, and I'm not aware of any analytics software that reads those logs. If there is one, please let me know, I'm interested.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      Sorry I don't know much about this sort of thing. It's just something that seemed conceptually possible? It's no mystery why Google would want all the data GA creates, but I've always wondered why e.g. Piwik isn't more popular.
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        Piwik isn't popular with me just because I don't want to run it myself (and keep it upgraded, etc), and the hosted version is as bad at tracking as GA is.
        pilom 10y ago
        We send all of our logs to CloudWatch Logs and then set up metrics for 200, 300, 400, and 500 http responses. It will graph all of them for you right in the console and you can add alerting if you need it.
        StavrosK 10y ago
        Oh, that's handy, thanks. It seems that we all need to go back to log-based analytics...
- pmlnr 10y ago
  > I'm guessing the HN crowd runs uBlock or some other blocker in its vast majority, so JS-based analytics are completely untrustworthy. Actually, the server based access logs would be more accurate. The "only" things the JS based are giving you are tracking options and user interface data, such as resolution. And yes, due to blocking, JS based will never be the as accurate as the server logs. A long time ago I used awstats[^1] and webalizer[^2]; those will show the traffic that your server(s) actually served. However, you'll need to log it, and if you have multiple machines, you'll need to centrally log it, and store it, which is not always simple and trivial to set up, compared inserting a JS in the HTML. [^1]: http://www.awstats.org/ http://www.awstats.org/ [^2]: http://www.webalizer.org/ http://www.webalizer.org/
citruspi 10y ago
> I decided to go one step further with my personal site and eliminate all JS completely. I'm close to that point. I just use it for loading a font and rendering gallery pages. From my site's colophon: > The website uses the flexbox grid from Foundation, and Mark Simonson's Proxima Nova font from Adobe Typekit. The only JavaScript on the website is used > 1. to load the font from Adobe Typekit and > 2. to render the gallery pages in the photography section > All other pages should be JavaScript-free. In addition there is no user tracking - aside from that performed by Adobe Typekit - and all assets (once again... aside from the font from Adobe Typekit) are served directly by my server(s), no CDN involved. Once I find a suitable replacement for Proxima Nova, Adobe Typekit will go away as well. I'd like to remove it from the gallery pages as well, but I just couldn't get flexbox working properly for responsive galleries of images of different resolutions.
empath75 10y ago
My 4 year old ipad is barely usable on even basic pages now because of all the js bullshit.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  5 year old smartphone here. Works fine with both Firefox and Habit Browser. I turn off JavaScript in the latter and it's significantly faster (as expected) but it's not as if Firefox is unusable at all. .. I did however just remember I have an ad blocker installed from day one, that might have something to do with it. Forgot about that difference.
pmlnr 10y ago
> I decided to go one step further with my personal site and eliminate all JS completely. I don't get enough traffic to make any kind of analytics or ad code worthwhile. I did the same a little while ago; if I want stats, I'll render them from the access logs, webalizer-style[^1]. Static HTML, with inlined CSS and SVG can get ridiculously fast on today's network, so if you don't have any actual reasons for JS (there are a lot of things CSS can do these days), just leave it behind. (You can also safely leave fonts, Google Analytics and all those external monsters behind.) Here's my summary on the experience of moving from WordPress to static HTML for longetivity and robustness: https://petermolnar.net/going-static https://petermolnar.net/going-static [^1]: http://www.webalizer.org/ http://www.webalizer.org/
komali2 10y ago
Did you use JS for anything else? Any dynamic content or even some UI ala jqueryUI?

by r1ch 10y ago

brianwawok 10y ago

The anti SPA. Love it. I don't really browse on my phone because the JS situation is so bad.

K0nserv 10y ago

Me too, I used to spend a fair amount of time looking at the tiny amount of traffic I got in GA. But just like you I decided the extra JS wasn't worth it and I'd rather have my website be completely void of JS even if that meant I'd loose visibility from not having GA. Cloudflare's analytics is good enough for me. As a result of being strict about JS and keeping the CSS down my website is super snappy and tiny.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

Same for me. I make money when people hire me as a consultant or buy my books. I started recently rewriting my sites as simple static content (and wrote about how I do this http://blog.markwatson.com/2016/12/benefits-of-static-web-sites-hosted-on.html http://blog.markwatson.com/2016/12/benefits-of-static-web-si...) I still have JS from bootstrap, and I am looking at bootstrap alternatives that are CSS only.

StavrosK 10y ago

> I don't get enough traffic to make any kind of analytics or ad code worthwhile. On a related note, does anyone else see GA being wildly inaccurate? My blog was on the HN front page a while ago, and CloudFront got ~600k hits, which should translate to about ~100k uniques (I cache), yet GA only showed 8k uniques. I'm guessing the HN crowd runs uBlock or some other blocker in its vast majority, so JS-based analytics are completely untrustworthy.

jessaustin 10y ago
In your case, what does GA do, that something reading Cloudfront logs couldn't do?
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Only two or three files are served from Cloudfront, and I'm not aware of any analytics software that reads those logs. If there is one, please let me know, I'm interested.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Sorry I don't know much about this sort of thing. It's just something that seemed conceptually possible? It's no mystery why Google would want all the data GA creates, but I've always wondered why e.g. Piwik isn't more popular.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Piwik isn't popular with me just because I don't want to run it myself (and keep it upgraded, etc), and the hosted version is as bad at tracking as GA is.
      - pilom 10y ago
        We send all of our logs to CloudWatch Logs and then set up metrics for 200, 300, 400, and 500 http responses. It will graph all of them for you right in the console and you can add alerting if you need it.
        StavrosK 10y ago
        Oh, that's handy, thanks. It seems that we all need to go back to log-based analytics...
pmlnr 10y ago
> I'm guessing the HN crowd runs uBlock or some other blocker in its vast majority, so JS-based analytics are completely untrustworthy. Actually, the server based access logs would be more accurate. The "only" things the JS based are giving you are tracking options and user interface data, such as resolution. And yes, due to blocking, JS based will never be the as accurate as the server logs. A long time ago I used awstats[^1] and webalizer[^2]; those will show the traffic that your server(s) actually served. However, you'll need to log it, and if you have multiple machines, you'll need to centrally log it, and store it, which is not always simple and trivial to set up, compared inserting a JS in the HTML. [^1]: http://www.awstats.org/ http://www.awstats.org/ [^2]: http://www.webalizer.org/ http://www.webalizer.org/

citruspi 10y ago

> I decided to go one step further with my personal site and eliminate all JS completely. I'm close to that point. I just use it for loading a font and rendering gallery pages. From my site's colophon: > The website uses the flexbox grid from Foundation, and Mark Simonson's Proxima Nova font from Adobe Typekit. The only JavaScript on the website is used > 1. to load the font from Adobe Typekit and > 2. to render the gallery pages in the photography section > All other pages should be JavaScript-free. In addition there is no user tracking - aside from that performed by Adobe Typekit - and all assets (once again... aside from the font from Adobe Typekit) are served directly by my server(s), no CDN involved. Once I find a suitable replacement for Proxima Nova, Adobe Typekit will go away as well. I'd like to remove it from the gallery pages as well, but I just couldn't get flexbox working properly for responsive galleries of images of different resolutions.

empath75 10y ago

My 4 year old ipad is barely usable on even basic pages now because of all the js bullshit.

lucb1e 10y ago
5 year old smartphone here. Works fine with both Firefox and Habit Browser. I turn off JavaScript in the latter and it's significantly faster (as expected) but it's not as if Firefox is unusable at all. .. I did however just remember I have an ad blocker installed from day one, that might have something to do with it. Forgot about that difference.

pmlnr 10y ago

> I decided to go one step further with my personal site and eliminate all JS completely. I don't get enough traffic to make any kind of analytics or ad code worthwhile. I did the same a little while ago; if I want stats, I'll render them from the access logs, webalizer-style[^1]. Static HTML, with inlined CSS and SVG can get ridiculously fast on today's network, so if you don't have any actual reasons for JS (there are a lot of things CSS can do these days), just leave it behind. (You can also safely leave fonts, Google Analytics and all those external monsters behind.) Here's my summary on the experience of moving from WordPress to static HTML for longetivity and robustness: https://petermolnar.net/going-static https://petermolnar.net/going-static [^1]: http://www.webalizer.org/ http://www.webalizer.org/

komali2 10y ago

Did you use JS for anything else? Any dynamic content or even some UI ala jqueryUI?