Fast. Faster. Fastest!

Fast. Faster. Fastest!
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin / Unsplash

When we set out to build Murmel last year, we had two crucial technical goals in mind:

  • Develop a small and robust core using a technology stack that delivers outstanding performance out of the door and for an extended time.
  • Be as lean about the user experience as possible. Instead, rely on the backend to keep delivering the site at a blazing-fast speed while allowing ourselves to tweak every single bit of the frontend.

This was instrumental in choosing Go as our backbone and performance driver. While there certainly are tech stacks better suited for quick development prototyping, we found out that the initial cost of setting things up quickly started paying off.

As a result of our decision, one aspect we have had to care little until now has been the performance of our site. Despite the constant new customer sign-ups and the non-stop background processing, we have managed to keep the delivery of the site within, and quite possibly, better than the industry standards.

It has given us quite a lot of runway to experiment with different frontend options. We have been adamant about our decision to use the backend as much as we can, which is why you won't see the typical single-page-app technology when you open Murmel. Instead, we are stepping on the shoulders of giants like Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, and HTMX to deliver the same expected level of interactivity, drastically lowering the frontend complexity.

While our focus last year was building a certain level of user experience so that our customers can get the most out of our site, one of our pillars for 2022 will be betting even more on performance and stability.

That is is why we began identifying parts of our app where we can drastically improve the frontend performance of our app by adding simple tweaks. We are happy to see the first results, making us more than excited.

In some particular areas, we have seen speed improvements of up to 10x. We know that this difference won't matter for most customers - whether something executes in 10ms or 100ms is almost indistinguishable for the human perception. It will, however, make a great deal for many in areas with insufficient Internet coverage, people on the go, etc. And frankly, it will free more toom for us to craft an even better user experience without worrying that our efforts may afflict the daily work of our customers.

Feel free to look at how our page performs, and don't hesitate to let us know if it drops below the 90% mark!

PageSpeed Insights

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