What the notes.rr2.dev redesign costs in speed

The old and new site, tested on four network speeds.

12 Oct 2026 · Back to the redesign post

Short answer: the first visit downloads about 40KB more, and text shows up 0.05–0.3 seconds later. Photos, video and repeat visits barely change. No lightweight mode needed.

When text appears

Seconds until the first words show, on a first visit to a text-only note. Shorter is better.

Old siteNew site

0 s0.5 s1 s

Show as a table

Connection	Old	New	Change
Wi-Fi	0.09 s	0.14 s	+0.05 s
Typical 4G	0.22 s	0.44 s	+0.21 s
Slow 4G	0.36 s	0.54 s	+0.18 s
Slow 3G	0.57 s	0.89 s	+0.32 s

Even on slow 3G, the new site shows text in under a second.

What gets downloaded

The first visit to a text-only note, next to a typical web page.

01,000 KB2,000 KB

The extra is two small fonts and the design inside each page. Next to a typical page, it is a sliver.

0 KBRepeat visits download nothing, on the old site and the new one. Fonts and pages come from the cache.

Photos and video

Photos arrive at the same time as before.
The video's poster shows up to 0.75 s later on slow 3G. Playback is unchanged.
No layout jumps, and the page never freezes on a phone.

Why no "lite" toggle

The cost is on the first visit, before anyone can press a toggle.
After that, everything is cached.
Bigger wins exist: lazy-load photos, respect data-saver mode, and use lighter analytics. Google Analytics alone adds about 155KB, four times the redesign.

How it was tested

Old and new site served like GitHub Pages, on six kinds of page and four throttled connections in Chrome, from Wi-Fi to slow 3G on a slowed-down phone. Three runs each, medians shown. Analytics was blocked in every run.

Sources

This note was generated in a Claude session (Opus 5.5).