Company
Date Published
Author
Kilian Valkhof
Word count
1074
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Kilian Valkhof's article explores strategies to improve the "Time to Interactive" metric for websites, highlighting its significance for SEO and user experience. He emphasizes the impact of third-party scripts on this metric, particularly in Gatsby sites, where the default performance can degrade with added scripts. Valkhof shares his experience with a performance drop after integrating Segment, which led to a significant increase in "Time to Interactive." To address this, he implemented a technique where scripts are loaded only after user interaction, such as scrolling, to prevent them from affecting the initial load time. This approach improved his website's performance score from 63 to 94. Valkhof also notes the trade-off of potentially less accurate bounce rates and suggests using Google Lighthouse to monitor site performance. He concludes by offering a solution that involves modifying the gatsby-plugin-segment-js to delay script loading, thereby enhancing performance and interactivity.