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Haven't deployed it yet, but if you're interested you can take a look at staging.samwho.dev to see the work I've been doing on my site. The numbers are looking good (this is compared against a deployment at old.samwho.dev from just after /big-o was published.)

5/10/26, 2:44 pm1 repost17 likes

Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

More granular lighthouse metrics. They're medians of 20 runs against each the old and new versions.

Alejandro AR

@kinduff.com

These optimization rabbit holes are so fun. I've sank insane amount of time doing routines like these for both performance and SEO for my products. And you know what? It works.

Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

Not really any great secrets here, a lot of the old pages were just dumb. I was including large deps that I only needed for some small purpose. Some of them I was able to replace with DIY code, some I could use a smaller version of the dependency.

Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

I also discovered with nginx you can precompress assets and it'll serve them from disk, so on deploy now I create gzip and brotli versions of everything at the highest possible compression settings so shave off a few percent more of the bundles.

Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

On top of that I noticed my site was using HTTP/1 and I hadn't configured HTTP/2 or /3, derp.

Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

A lot of the increases in accessibility score came from better contrast on text and visuals. I now have automated tests ensuring I maintain 4.5:1 contrast ratios on my smaller text, and 3:1 on larger. I've gone through and had a go at a better set of colour tokens for the site.