This post includes recommendations for teams that are procuring websites, and I think they can be summed up as: *buy simpler problems*.
Every feature that gets added via JavaScript is more complex, more expensive, and harder to improve. That means that when things go wrong, they're treble costly to fix because JS is *"f-it! we'll do it live!"* for web development. JS disables or routes around all the ways the browsers try to help.
Let browsers help!
Everyone in a site's production chain has agency to prevent disaster
The number of times I tried advocating for this at my previous job 🤷♀️ I didn’t always succeed but talking about it, repeatedly, is useful. “Isn’t that your job?” was always on the tip of their tongue, understandibly (to a degree).
The best argument I found was in the studies that show x% longer page load leads to y% loss of conversion (ie. direct correlation to campaign success, hence revenue).
And the best example for that was the home page, specifically the hero images in a carousel that was under the responsibility of the marketing team. They had tools to upload the images, set the links and alt text in the various languages the site was available in, set a schedule etc so there was no technical involvement at all. Sometimes there would be 6 or 7 images in that carousel, noticeably slowing down page loads on that most important page.
Alex Russell
Guillaume Rossolini
Stuart 