Almost everyone knows and feels nowadays that the wires carrying the bits and bytes that create our online experience are under high amount of stress, and its not just anecdotal anymore. As this NYT article
states, ever since COVID-19 started a few months ago, the average
internet speed has been gradually degrading all over the world.
Whether its a video conferencing call with your friends or colleagues, or watching something on YouTube or Netflix, the stress is being felt everywhere. You no longer get the speeds that you were used to earlier and if you get, you are no longer able to share it with as many family members as before.
Without getting into the technical merits of why this is happening, at least one thing is clear: there is no place for slow and bloated sites in the digital world right now when the resources are already so much stressed. If we start allowing bloat-ridden react and angular pages too on top of this, then we are indulging in tremendous avoidable waste which isn't in the best interests of anyone, be it Google or users or the ISPs.
The web was pretty fast and high performant (relatively speaking) when client side JS was restricted to only jquery and few other light weight libraries like underscore. But when the SPA bandwagon started gaining momentum, especially with bloated frameworks like angular and react, that's when the load started increasing and it was no longer possible to even surf the net without a super high speed (mbps) connection.
The onus is on search engines like Google now to help fix this. Google ranking algorithms are geared to rank search results based on content quality. However, the speed of content delivery is as much an important attribute of content quality and cannot be neglected. Besides, competition has increased so much among content publishers now that the Google algos can afford to prioritise the next best link which is similar in content quality but much faster in performance.
Ultimately, its the people who are the sufferers, so they hold some responsibility in fixing this too. The social media influencers who share content online and thus popularize it should also ensure that the link they are sharing is also fast apart from being good, because what they share and how much traction the link gets affects its ranking too.
And last but not the least, the most important responsibility lies on the shoulders of web developers! Avoid complex frameworks like angular and react unless you are a seasoned expert and know exactly what you're doing and what your framework does under the hoods. If you aren't that then please stick to the proven and time-tested model of MPA coupled with lightweight libraries like jquery, its in the best interests of everyone.
Internet is a public resource and as such must be used judiciously. It was only thanks to the nature of the Moore's law that allowed even the most bloated sites to thrive on the net during last few years. But there is a limit to how much even the Moore's law can be stressed, resources aren't unlimited. Its time to introspect on this and start thinking about conserving network resources.
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