Going minimal

This website has been online for 12 years, it's gone through a lot of changes in that time. It started out as a WordPress site with a free template, then it was a static website, at the moment it's a Java backend serving markdown files.

For a while I've wanted to really strip it back to the bare minimum. I'd be using some free HTML template for a while, which was nice enough but it used Bootstrap, a fair whack of CSS and JS and I also had quite a lot of images on the site that weren't really adding any value.

CSS and JS

Bootstrap had to go, it's a nice framework but it's too heavy, I was using an older version that included the kitchen sink and all the JS that goes with it.

I've replaced it with Pico.css a bare-bones CSS framework with no JS. By default it has a very easy-on-the-eye look across all devices, doesn't use custom CSS classes and doesn't require as many DIVs as Bootstrap did. That results in less CSS, no JS and smaller HTML files too.

Fonts

Pico's defaults just look lovely, the font selected is system-ui or sans-serif, the CSS declaration will pick from some Google Font sans options if you have them installed, e.g. Roboto, but you ain't getting them as a download from me, no sir.

Analytics

It felt weirdly tough for me to get rid of Google Analytics even though I never paid any attention to it. Guess it's a bit of FOMO. I know its optimised for performance but its just another file that needs to be downloaded and I don't really do anything with the data.

Logo

I converted my logo from JPG to SVG using an online converter. The old JPG was about 70kb, the SVG is 3kb. I hadn't looked at SVG in a long time, was surprised by two things: one, the online converter created a perfect replica of the JPEG, and two, all browsers now support SVG.

Under 100kb

Unzipped the average webpage on moreofless.co.uk is now about 80kb, the server sends everything compressed, so actual transfer size is 16.52kb.