My blog just scored a perfect 100 on every Lighthouse category. I wanted a blog that was light, fast, free of clutter, able to run multiple blogs, and fully accessible. After a tedious process, I removed Next.js, the framework I had used most. I started by building my own blog because existing platforms like Medium and Blogger were bloated with features and had poor performance. Working with raw markup and code like Markdown and HTML was important to me. I evaluated alternatives like WordPress, Ghost, and Hugo, but each had drawbacks: WordPress suffered from plugin issues, Ghost was expensive and upgrades broke the editor, and Hugo remained a hassle to set up. I ultimately wanted a SaaS solution and liked Bear Blog for its performance and philosophy, but its minimalism and editor UX were limiting. I wanted something as fast as Bear Blog but with more functionality and better usability.
To improve performance, caching was essential. While Next.js offers ISR and fetch caching, my site is globally accessible, making regional latency a problem. A CDN alone sufficed for a static site, allowing me to drop Next.js entirely. Image optimization was critical, as unoptimized images over 10MB would destroy performance. I used Cloudflare's Image Transformations to handle resizing and compression efficiently. The result is a fast, static blog that achieves top Lighthouse scores without the complexity of a framework.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing