How We Boosted Website Speed by 24% Using 3 Unusual Frontend Tricks

Performance optimization is a timeless concern for developers, and with evolving frameworks we explored three unconventional techniques that reduced our job‑search platform’s load time by 24%.

We needed fast load times for two reasons: good user experience and better SEO, as Google favors performant sites.

Common tricks such as using a CDN, optimizing images, enabling GZIP/Brotli compression, and trimming non‑critical JS/CSS were applied, but we sought further gains.

Our homepage is a filterable list built with React, so we introduced react-window to render only ten items at a time instead of the full 250.

1. Preload JSON data

We added a rel="preload" link for the JSON endpoint in index.html, allowing the browser to fetch the data before the AJAX request. This saved about 0.5 seconds.

2. Simple client‑side cache

After preloading, the job list remained a bottleneck (~0.8 s). Node‑side caching gave no benefit, so we implemented a tiny JavaScript cache: store the fetched jobs in a variable and clear it on POST /jobs. This reduced load time by another 0.4 seconds.

3. Trim CSS and JS bundles

We discovered the font‑awesome bundle was over 70 KB while only ~20 % of icons were used. By creating a custom icon set via icomoon.io we cut the bundle by 50 KB.

These three unconventional changes together cut overall load time by 24%, with some reports showing up to a 43% reduction to 1–2 seconds. We are pleased with the results and continue to look for more improvements.