I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!
I am interested in your fast loading techniques in general. I also am considering making a bunch of personal / pro websites where I'll use a static generator. Just looking for some inspiration and ideas to steal I suppose.
Since it's kinda fresh pursuit for me, I am still looking to gather some links and do proper research. I wasn't looking to deanonymize you, my apologies.
As far as my inspiration, I use Craigslist and google as my inspiration. I try to get a sleek and simple look like google pages, but maintain the “old school” functionality and layout ideas of Craigslist .
As far as actual development is concerned, I use oracle ARM servers that are grossly overpowered for a webhost, cloudflare nameservers OR CDN, and I keep as much of the development as possible server side with as little JavaScript as I can. An example was a simple blogging system I made. The entire system is set up with a MariaDB table that has “title, date, image url, and content” as the data bits for it, and then each function works on one of two pages: a backend using php session that has all of the functions with get request, and a front end that has all of its content on a page with post requests. There is no JavaScript involved on either page, which means the stuff transmitted over the internet is lesser, the stuff done on the client computer is lesser, and the number of outside calls is lesser. This does make it “less responsive”, but does the blog really need image zoom in on hover and shit like that?
I have found the best way to develop for speed and simplicity is to curb the enthusiasm of the client from “looks as good as possible” to “simple, cheap, fast, and robust, while still looking better than average”
The final suggestion I have is to develop with security AND accessibility in mind first. If you want to put aria links of all of your stuff, it is much harder to go back later and 1) determine what the link does, and 2) write an aria for it than it is to just include it in the first place. Always follow proper form for mitigating risks like SQL injection and XSS, and do as much as possible on the server before you resort to JS.
If you are looking for a couple of sites that I didn’t build, but get the point of what I am trying to do across, check out
Smashingmagazine.com Hacker news doesn’t look the best, but it follows the logic set forth, Openai.com (this one surprised me because if you remove a lot of the slightly more interactive elements it is fast as hell)
If you have any specific questions, ask away and I’ll do my best