This is why performance matters

I just had a power cut and wanted to check how long it would be out for. The UK Power Networks power outage tool is handy for that, but there’s a problem: I only had a 3G network connection and the site is heavily dependent on JavaScript.

Can you guess what happened? Yep: I couldn’t access the content I really needed to get access to.

In this video, I tried to load the site. It took just under a minute to show any content, and then I ended up giving up completely after watching it load for 3 minutes. 3 minutes. Obscene.

I understand that the nature of how they display content requires JavaScript, but some progressive enhancement would be ideal in this situation. It could have rendered a simple list of incidents with HTML, then, if the JavaScript loads (not when), it could replace that with the map.

Performance matters because you never know what conditions your site will be met with, regardless of the “need” for JavaScript.

At the very least, test for very slow connections and consider who you’re building for.