Keeping a small site fast without a build pipeline

September 18, 2026

Most of the sites we maintain have fewer than twenty pages. For those, a build step often costs more in upkeep than it saves in convenience. Over the summer we moved three of them to hand-written HTML and a single stylesheet, and the pages got faster and the deploys got boring.

What made the difference

• One stylesheet, inlined for the critical part and cached for the rest.
• System fonts instead of hosted ones. No layout shift, no extra request.
• Images sized to the layout, in a modern format, with explicit width and height.
• No third-party scripts unless the site cannot work without them.

None of this is new. The surprise was how much of the remaining slowness came from things we had added without really deciding to.

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Backups are only real once you have restored one

August 27, 2026

A client's database server filled its disk in the middle of the night. The nightly backups had been running for a year, and the restore took us most of a morning, mostly because nobody had ever tried it.

Since then we do a short restore drill every quarter: pick a backup at random, restore it to a scratch machine, and check that the site comes up with recent data. We write down how long it took. The first drill found two problems, a missing config file and an expired credential, and both were easy to fix on a calm afternoon.

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Why we went back to plain CSS

July 9, 2026

For years we reached for a framework by reflex. On the last few projects we tried the opposite: custom properties for colours and spacing, a handful of layout helpers, and nothing else. The stylesheets came out smaller than the framework's reset alone.

The trade-off is that you have to make decisions the framework used to make for you. We think that is mostly a good thing. A site with a few deliberate choices tends to look more like itself than one assembled from defaults.

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