Small and fast

Due to an local outage, I've had no broadband connection and been mostly offline for the last few days.

The only connection I've had is a weak 4G signal from my mobile phone that I've been able to tether from to check emails, etc.

But this is slow and I struggled to load the majority of websites.

Some would take a number of seconds or minutes to load, or fail.

As websites and applications develop and grow, it's important to try and keep your codebase as lean and performant as possible.

You never know what connection people will be using your code from.

What if their broadband goes down or they're in an area with a poor mobile signal?

They may not be able to download your large CSS or JS file, or execute the unoptimised database query.

You can't assume everyone will be using a high speed Internet connection, so avoid feature bloat, optimise for performance and keep things small and fast.