lighthouse VS Turbolinks

When we implemented the MVP of the fintech app, we had a quite complicated form. At that time, I was still young and inexperienced. And eventually, we realized that our project was slowing down. We had to spend additional hours figuring out the reason. We had many unnecessary re-renders because we ignored basic rules related to props in React. I wanted to do everything possible to avoid such situations in the future. So, I added to the project linters like this and an additional starting configuration to package.json to run why-did-you-render. In short, this plugin issues a warning if something is re-rendered unnecessarily and suggests how to avoid it. Also, we included running Lighthouse in headless mode. Some people say that premature optimizations are bad, but for me, it's a principle: do it right from the start.

There's a link to what they mean by mobile network there (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/blob/main/docs/throttling.md) and it says:

Here's the non-psuedo code equivalent that can leverage CompressionStream rather than using a browserified-gzip-library: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/blob/437eb4d757c5...

We use it in Lighthouse for the exact same purpose, a URL #hash full of state. We found that modern browsers support 10mb of data in the hash. https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/pull/12509#discus...

You can find out if your SaaS app is slowing down with Google Chrome Lighthouse. Lighthouse should be a staple in your monitoring because it lets you see the performance, accessibility, and SEO metrics related to your app's performance.

[2] https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/issues/10023#issu...

Lighthouse: A tool developed by Google to measure a website’s performance using an average of six metrics.

Performance Using Lighthouse as a measurement tool, the blog should score 100 on all criteria.

For implementation testing (e.g. WCAG 2.1 compliance, performance, best sec practices) there are checkers like webhint, lighthouse, and Pa11y.

The website should score 80+ in performance, SEO, and accessibility in Google Lighthouse tests. Plus, the load time should always be less than 2 seconds and ideally in the order of a few hundreds of milliseconds. The real challenge lies here, since the website consists of more than 2 million pages, and pre-rendering them all will take weeks. Also, the content shown in most of the pages is not static. Thus, we opted for an incremental static regeneration approach. When a visitor hits a page no one ever visited, Next.js generates it with the data retrieved from the APIs exposed by the backend. Then, Next.js caches the page for 30 or 60 seconds, depending on the importance of the page.

// app/javascript/src/helpers/price.js // Turbolinks are enabled by default in Rails, // we need to process our script on every page load // https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks#full-list-of-events document.addEventListener("turbolinks:ready", () => { // Get language from html tag const lang = document.documentElement.lang; // Find all span tags with data-localize="price" const pricesOnPage = document.querySelectorAll("[data-localize=\"price\"]"); if (pricesOnPage.length > 0) { // Iterate all price span tags [...pricesOnPage].forEach(priceOnPage => { // Modify text in span tag according to current language priceOnPage.textContent = priceOnPage.textContent.toLocaleString( lang, { style: "currency", currency: "USD" } ); }) } });

Because it feels fast, it actually is not. It is using Turbolinks. https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks And Laravel Wrapper for Turbolinks: https://github.com/frenzyapp/turbolinks

https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks

It provides a smooth UX by fetching next page's HTML in background, then replace the DOM by compareing the diff in HTML. So you won't see a blank page while navigating between pages.

If you have used Turbolinks in the past, you will feel right at home with Turbo Drive. At its core, some JS code intercepts JavaScript events on your application, loads HTML asynchronously, and replaces parts of your HTML markup.

When the Turbolinks technology first came out in Rails 4, some people did not understand what it was really about. I happened to get it right away only because I personally implemented my own version of Turbo Drive for one of my client projects before Turbolinks was released (around 2012), so I really appreciated Turbolinks when it was released. With the latest updates in Rails 7, the Turbolinks technology has been renamed to Turbo Drive (now part of Hotwire) since it not only accelerates hyperlinks anymore, but also form submissions too.

Turbolinks, a great tool to make navigating your web application faster, is no longer under active development. It has been superseded by a new framework called Turbo, which is part of the Hotwire umbrella.

source 'https://rubygems.org' git_source(:github) { |repo| "https://github.com/#{repo}.git" } ruby '2.7.3' # Bundle edge Rails instead: gem 'rails', github: 'rails/rails' gem 'rails', '~> 6.0.3', '>= 6.0.3.7' gem 'mongoid', git: 'https://github.com/mongodb/mongoid.git' # Use Puma as the app server gem 'puma', '~> 4.1' # Use SCSS for stylesheets gem 'sass-rails', '>= 6' # Transpile app-like JavaScript. Read more: https://github.com/rails/webpacker gem 'webpacker', '~> 4.0' # Turbolinks makes navigating your web application faster. Read more: https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks gem 'turbolinks', '~> 5' # Build JSON APIs with ease. Read more: https://github.com/rails/jbuilder gem 'jbuilder', '~> 2.7' # Use Redis adapter to run Action Cable in production # gem 'redis', '~> 4.0' # Use Active Model has_secure_password # Use Active Storage variant # gem 'image_processing', '~> 1.2' gem 'axlsx' gem 'caxlsx_rails' #Bootstrap for UI gem 'bootstrap', '~> 5.1.0' gem 'bootstrap-timepicker-rails', '~> 0.1.3' gem 'bootstrap-select-rails', '~> 1.6', '>= 1.6.3' #JQuery Rails gem 'jquery-rails' gem 'rails_12factor', group: :production # Reduces boot times through caching; required in config/boot.rb gem 'bootsnap', '>= 1.4.2', require: false group :development, :test do # Call 'byebug' anywhere in the code to stop execution and get a debugger console gem 'byebug', platforms: [:mri, :mingw, :x64_mingw] end group :development do # Access an interactive console on exception pages or by calling 'console' anywhere in the code. gem 'web-console', '>= 3.3.0' gem 'listen', '~> 3.2' gem 'pry' # Spring speeds up development by keeping your application running in the background. Read more: https://github.com/rails/spring gem 'spring' gem 'spring-watcher-listen', '~> 2.0.0' end group :test do # Adds support for Capybara system testing and selenium driver gem 'capybara', '>= 2.15' gem 'selenium-webdriver' # Easy installation and use of web drivers to run system tests with browsers gem 'webdrivers' gem 'cucumber-rails', require: false gem 'database_cleaner' end # Windows does not include zoneinfo files, so bundle the tzinfo-data gem gem 'tzinfo-data', platforms: [:mingw, :mswin, :x64_mingw, :jruby] #HTTParty for RESTful API calls gem 'httparty' #Paperclip for storing files gem 'paperclip' gem "mongoid-paperclip", :require => "mongoid_paperclip" gem "letter_opener", :group => :development r

We’ll use Ruby on Rails and Turbo to accomplish this, but we could use Turbo’s predecessor, Turbolinks to achieve the same result, and Rails is only incidental to the finished project. We could just as easily use Turbo with any other "multi-page" framework and deliver the same experience.

Check out StimulusJs and Turbolinks their whole purpose is to add only a tiny bit of js to a server side rendered website, to give a feel similar to that of client-side rendered web pages.