Our median visitor is not on a new laptop. They are hungry, on a mid-range phone, on a weak connection, deciding in seconds whether to order or open a delivery app instead.
The budget
We give every storefront a strict budget: meaningful content in under two seconds on a throttled 4G profile. Client-rendered pages could not meet it once a menu passed a few hundred items.
- HTML arrives with the menu already in it.
- JavaScript hydrates only the cart and the item modal.
- Images are sized per device at the edge.
The fastest JavaScript is the JavaScript you don't send.
Server rendering is not fashionable advice, but for our customers it is the difference between an order and a bounce.