While looking for the blog’s RSS feed (sadly it doesn’t appear to have one anymore), I noticed that the size of the HTML alone was nearly 5 MB uncompressed. Over the course of scrolling to the bottom of the page, it loads tons of 4+ MB JSON files. The unscaled author images and numerous tracking scripts also contribute to the enormous payload. I don’t know enough about Next.js internals to say what went wrong here, but that seems ridiculous for a simple blog.
Yeah, it's definitely out there. With NoScript on it's not noticeably slow or anything and I obviously see just the main page load, which works, and makes me further question why any of the included JS is even necessary.
The benefit of a static site generator like Next.js is that you can cache everything at the edge. It’s not surprising to me that the initial page loads quickly (via Cloudflare’s cache). But the multi-megabyte JSON embedded in the HTML as well as the multiple JSON files loading in the background are completely unnecessary and just waste battery, memory, and data. The page could easily be 1-5% of its current size.
Had they served me a static image containing everything I see, it would've come to around 300KB.
Maybe they should consider serving a page-sized video stream of their site to conserve bandwidth. Spin up a VM for each visitor on their server.