I click the link. The page loads fast. I navigate the surprisingly sparse yet clear form inputs. And complete the whole thing in less than thirty seconds.
Oh, how I wish this experience weren’t remarkable!
Simple forms with clear labels. Little to no branding being shoved down my throat. No array of colors, big logos, or overly-customized UI components.
SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.
Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.
Many interactions are not possible without JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean we should look to write more than we have to. The server doing something useful is a requirement for building an interesting business. The client doing something is often a nice-to-have.
There’s also this:
It’s really fast
One of the arguments for a SPA is that it provides a more reactive customer experience. I think that’s mostly debunked at this point, due to the performance creep and complexity that comes in with a more complicated client-server relationship.
Here’s a handy free tool from Calibre that’ll give your website a performance assessment.
“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”
Why were they slow? The answer: React.
“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”
What Trys describes here mirrors my experience too—it really is worth occasionally taking a little time to catch the low-hanging fruit of your site’s web performance (and accessibility):
I’ve shaved nearly half a megabyte off the page size and improved the accessibility along the way. Not bad for an evening of tinkering.
In which I find a tagline for Web Day Out and a tagline for React.
This line-up just gets better and better! You’ll want to be in Brighton on March 12th, 2026.
How I switched to high-resolution maps on The Session without degrading performance.
Safari 18 supports `content-visibility: auto` …but there’s a very niche little bug in the implementation.
You might want to use `display: contents` …maybe.