I improved Page Speed from 80 to 91 -- can you help me get closer to 100?

Katie - Jun 22 '20 - - Dev Community

I finally took the world’s advice and split my blog’s JavaScript into “load first” and “load last” sections. I brought my Google PageSpeed Insights score for KatieKodes.com on mobile up from 80 to 91. That said, it still feels low and I'd love help from the #DEVcommunity!


Discussion Prompt

It looks like my only image on my home page is my SVG logo, so I’m a little mystified why I’m still all the way down at 91 on mobile and 95 on desktop.

Does anyone here at Dev have any ideas for how I could get my “first contentful paint” even snappier without too much effort and without sacrificing things like "cumulative layout shift"?

How I did it

I used to have a file called scripts.txt that I injected into the <head></head> of my site.

It included the 6-line JavaScript for my archive expander/contractor arrow toggles as well as calls to some external JavaScript, like Google Analytics and LinkedIn/Twitter widget I had long ago stopped using.

I split it into two files: scripts_internal.txt and scripts_external.txt.

  1. I left scripts_internal.txt in the <head></head>. Maybe it doesn’t need to live there, but I didn’t want to take a lot of time to debug.
  2. I moved scripts_external.txt to live as the last piece of HTML injected into the <body></body> of my web site.

I also got rid of the LinkedIn/Twitter widget JavaScript it turned out I’d long ago replaced with simple links.

Moral of the story: don’t just read the textbook on web site optimization – do your homework too!

(How many times had I read to do this one little thing before I actually did it?)

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