Company
Date Published
Author
Jonas Badalic
Word count
1945
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Algolia's performance is a core feature, delivering millisecond results across millions of records. The company's website was redesigned to mirror this excellence in performance, with the goal of providing a fast user experience. By removing external dependencies and optimizing code, the website's load time was significantly reduced. The team also implemented techniques such as transpiling code, profiling JavaScript code, and using the IntersectionObserver API to reduce jank behavior. Additionally, they adopted a set of helper classes for CSS and used WebP image compression to reduce file sizes. HTTP/2 server push was also enabled to improve performance. Finally, optimizing HTML document size by inlining SVG assets resulted in further improvements. The team measured their progress using Chrome Lighthouse and webpagetest tools, achieving significant reductions in load time and improvements in runtime performance. These efforts have helped provide a unified and fast experience for all users and visitors.