You can use Kirby to create high performance websites
2023-03-03
One of my slight worries in starting to use Kirby was whether I would be able to create very high performance websites. Turns out, I needn't have worried.
When I started moving my sites to 11ty, one of the main reasons was to gain more control of their performance. And it worked. 11ty is brilliant, and a great fit for many situations. 11ty generates static HTML, so nearly all the computation goes into initially generating the site, while once its up and running it's incredibly efficient. I use it for my personal website, and I'll keep using it wherever performance is critical.
As I started to use Kirby, I wondered whether the overheads introduced by having a CMS running all the while would mean a slight drop in performance compared to 11ty. And would a system running off text files like Kirby be performant? I've learnt for sure this week that there is no meaningful overhead. Having spent some time optimising this Careful Digital site (taking out Bootstrap and replacing it with vanilla CSS, further minimising the use of Javascript) I was able to get straight 100s in all categories (Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO) for Core Web Vitals (using PageSpeed Insights).
Now to be clear: Core Web Vitals aren't the be-all-and-end-all and there's a lot of work to be done optimising this site for people rather than performance metrics systems. If this website suddenly grew, both in terms of content and traffic, I would probably need to think about further optimisations to maintain performance. But Kirby is clearly a great tool for both creating websites with a fantastic editor experience, and websites that can perform at the highest levels.
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