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You should still look at your site with JavaScript disabled.

If you don't, you risk overlooking serious threats to key performance metrics.

Even today, it’s still worth looking at your sites with JavaScript disabled.

Many of them have either a couple of elements that depend on JS to show/hire correctly, or a big chunk of the page rendered as a single-page application.

In either case, the user interface isn’t “ready” after page load until JS has a chance to download, parse, and execute, which means core web vitals like largest contentful paint and cumulative layout shift are at risk. For your users, it means a flash of jank when they visit the page.

Some of the fixes for this are simple (ex: use CSS to hide elements that should be invisible by default), and others might get a little crazier (ex. prerender an embedded SPA into part of a page).

Fortunately, this stuff is easy to diagnose. Disable JavaScript, load the page, and see what’s ugly.


Alex MacArthur is a software engineer working for Dave Ramsey in Nashville-ish, TN.
Soli Deo gloria.

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