4.6 KiB
Tags: #webdev #golang #htmx #performance #nextjs #optimization #backend
Co-authored by LLMs
Rebuilding My Portfolio: Faster, Leaner, and Built for the Web That Actually Exists
I recently rebuilt my portfolio website, and the project turned out to be a great reminder of how modern web stacks can feel powerful—but also unnecessarily heavy—when all you really need is speed and clarity.
My old site was built with Next.js. It started as a borrowed template and slowly grew into a bundle of features: GitHub activity widgets, sandboxed project previews, a little 3D solar system, code-typing animations, and other decorative interactions. All of it worked—just not quickly.
The site consistently took over one second to become interactive. For a personal portfolio, that delay felt wasteful. Most visitors aren’t looking for an immersive app; they just want clean, readable information.
You can still see the archived version at old.webark.in, and you’ll immediately notice the difference.
Why I Moved Away From Next.js
Next.js wasn’t the villain here. It’s great for full-scale applications. But for a simple, mostly static portfolio, the abstractions—SSR, hydration, client-side bundles, routing layers, and build pipelines—added more complexity than benefit.
So I rebuilt everything using a simpler stack:
- Go + Echo for fast, explicit server-side rendering and routing
- Goldmark for Markdown processing (server-side, no client-side parsing)
- HTMX for small pockets of interactivity without a front-end framework
- A minimal, industrial-feel design focused on speed and readability
This alone cut load times to ~300 ms. Pages rendered instantly, the codebase shrank dramatically, and the whole system felt easier to reason about.
Adding Features Back… and Hitting a Wall
With the core structure working beautifully, I reintroduced two dynamic pieces:
- My GitHub contribution stats
- My blog feed
Almost immediately, load times jumped from ~300 ms to ~700 ms.
That wasn’t terrible—but it felt like a step backward. The slowdown wasn't caused by Echo, HTMX, or Go. It was caused by where I was fetching data:
I was calling external APIs during the request cycle, blocking the entire render until GitHub responded.
No HTML was sent until the GitHub API call completed. And without framework-level abstractions like caching or static generation, the delay hit the user directly.
HTMX as Lightweight “Hydration”
The fix was obvious once I saw the bottleneck: don’t make the initial page load wait for remote APIs.
Instead, I shifted from blocking SSR to progressive loading using HTMX.
Before (Blocking)
- User requests
/ - Server fetches GitHub data
- Server renders the template
- Only then does HTML get sent back
After (HTMX-enhanced)
- User requests
/ - Server immediately returns static HTML (with placeholders)
- HTMX fires background requests to fetch stats
- Received fragments are swapped into the page
This change preserved the super-fast initial load without sacrificing dynamic data.
The page becomes visible almost instantly, and the asynchronous HTMX swaps feel natural—similar to hydration, but without any client-side runtime or heavy JS bundles.
Lessons From the Rebuild
1. Not every site needs a full framework
For mostly-static content, a minimal backend + progressive enhancement often wins in clarity and speed.
2. SSR is only fast when your data is local
If your render pipeline waits on third-party APIs, you're no longer doing “fast SSR”—you’re doing “SSR with built-in delays.”
3. Interactivity doesn’t require an SPA
HTMX continues to prove that small, targeted interactions can replace entire client-side frameworks.
4. Perceived performance matters most
Sending HTML quickly has a bigger impact than many deep optimizations that happen later.
The Final Result
The new portfolio is dramatically faster, simpler, and lighter. On a slow 4G network, the old site took over six seconds to load. The new one loads in about two seconds, even under similar conditions.
That improvement comes from:
- A lean backend
- An HTMX-powered loading model
- ~10× less data transferred compared to the previous build
- No hydration, no bundlers, no labyrinth of abstractions
The rebuild didn’t just improve the site—it clarified how I want to approach small web projects going forward: focus on speed, reduce moving parts, and keep the behavior predictable.