Optimization: Avoid enormous network payloads

[rfultz]

Background

Looking to optimize the site's performance and that of the homepage specifically, the Lighthouse tool in Chromium browsers has made some suggestions. Some of these will have repercussions throughout the app so we're going to make them their own tickets.

Recommendation: Avoid enormous network payloads

Large network payloads cost users real money and are highly correlated with long load times. details

Overview

We could better optimize our file sizes… but could also quickly burn through hours

• May become less of an issue as we remove unused files
• May solve itself with an upgrade of our build process (Webpack 4+)

Benefit (the 80 of 80/20)

Noticeable.

Effort (the 20 of 80/20)

Potentially extensive if we fall into an optimization time sink

Complications

• Could burn through time
• Could make the build process or maintenance/update version overly complicated

Related tickets

• Preload key requests
• Remove unused JavaScript
• Remove unused CSS
• Preconnect to required origins
• Eliminate render-blocking resources
• Ensure text remains visible during webfont load
• Reduce the impact of third-party code
• Does not use passive listeners to improve scrolling performance
• Image elements do not have explicit width and height
• Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy
• Minimize main-thread work
• Avoid an excessive DOM size
• Reduce JavaScript execution time
• [aria-hidden="true"] elements contain focusable descendents
• Elements with an ARIA [role] that require children to contain a specific [role] are missing some or all of those required children
• [aria-*] attributes do not have valid values
• ARIA IDs are not unique
• Lists do not contain only
• elements and script supporting elements (<script> and )
• [user-scalable="no"] is used in the element or the [maximum-scale] attribute is less than 5
• Links to cross-origin destinations are unsafe
• Serves images with low resolution