Web guides
Written from operating our own servers rather than from reading someone else's post about it. Each one came from something that was wrong on our infrastructure until we measured it.
The guides
nginx gzip silently doing nothing
gzip on; covers only text/html, and gzip_proxied defaults to off. Both were wrong on our server for years. Fixing them cut transfer by half.
Base64 fonts are blocking your render
Ours was 138KB of which 94% was font data, all render-blocking, with font-display:block hiding text for up to three seconds.
nginx has no default_server
Delete a vhost and that hostname falls through to whichever site loads first alphabetically. Ours would have served webmail.
AI search optimization, per Google
No llms.txt, no AI schema, no chunking. What the documentation actually says, and the one audit that is genuinely worth running.
Why these particular ones
Both came out of the same habit: measuring our own systems rather than assuming they were fine. The gzip problem had been costing us half our bandwidth since the server was built, and it was invisible because HTML was compressed — the half that worked concealed the half that did not.
The pattern generalises. The defects that survive longest are the ones that produce a plausible-looking result. A speed score that moves, a green tick in a dashboard, a page that loads. If you have never checked a thing directly, assume it is a coin flip.
What we are writing next
| Guide | The thing that catches people |
|---|---|
| Measuring Core Web Vitals with CDP | Driving real Chrome over the debugging protocol, so the numbers come from the same API Google reads. |
| Zero-dependency Node in production | What you give up, what you gain, and when a framework genuinely earns its weight. |
| Immutable caching without a build step | ETags, stale-while-revalidate and why no-cache does not mean what most people think. |
Send us a URL and we will tell you what it is shipping
Compression, caching, render-blocking assets and real Core Web Vitals — measured, with every finding attributed to the file causing it.
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