[Go Make Things] Removing React dramatically improves performance: a case study

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

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The New Stack just published an article about a web app called Mindsapp.

The dev team decided to move away from React to browser-native DOM APIs, using server side rendering (SSR) built with Node.js and Web Components for the front end.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it's what I've been advocating for years, and how I build sites for my clients. Developer Julien Moulis notes…

we reduced the load time on some pages with a lot of data, from 6 seconds to 300ms.

They made the site 20 times faster by dropping React and switching to plain old HTML and vanilla JavaScript!

"We were completely surprised by the speed gain," Moulis said. "Our application engine is designed to produce complex ERP-type applications, which involve heavy data consumption to present in real-time. On a page we consider complex, with over 800 DOM elements, some of which use different subscription systems via our event system at initialization to update when necessary, the overall load time dropped from 4-5 seconds to 400ms."

I'm actually not surprised by this at all.

Five years ago, Zach Leatherman found that rendering 8.5mb of pre-rendered HTML was faster than loading a single tweet with React.

Incidentally, one of the things Mindsapp found hardest about all of this was finding devs who actually know platform-native JavaScript!

He added that finding developers who know vanilla JavaScript and not just the frameworks was an "unexpected difficulty."

If you want to be one of those devs, check out the Lean Web Club.

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Cheers,
Chris

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