Your website is slow because your organisation doesn’t understand the web.
Not because performance is hard.
Not because browsers are limited.
But because you've lost control of your systems, culture, and vision.
www.jonoalderson.com/performance/...
We’ve normalised building around constraints we don’t question.
But CMSs, browsers, standards and platforms aren’t weather. They’re shaped by people.
If you depend on them (you do), you can shape them too.
That’s where the real leverage is.
www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/r...
“I want to rank for X” is how almost everyone gets SEO wrong.
You don’t choose what you rank for. You’re inferred.
Keywords describe demand. They’re not a strategy.
If you’re not building unique, experience-backed utility, you'll be invisible.
www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...
Genius tech bro move:
Inventing the paragraph,
Calling it a chunk.
#showerthoughts
Been saying this for a while but the really exciting stuff on the web right now is all about how things we used to need JS for can now be done with pure CSS.
There are a lot of opportunities to cut out client side bloat.
I haven't, but I'm sure it's ̶a̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ delightful!
website.bmp
If you run a large-scale/complex site, this is important. Make sure you know where Googlebot could go crazy crawling. E.g. As Gary said, "once Googlebot discovers a set of URLs, it cannot make a decision about whether that URL space is good or not unless it crawled a large chunk of that URL space"
Stop turning your website into markdown.
Meaning lives in structure, hierarchy and context. Flatten it and you don’t make it machine-friendly, you make it meaningless.
Yes, AI might fetch your .md file. That’s convenience, not trust, and it won't scale.
www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/m...
The middle of the market is quietly dying.
Breadth and “good enough” used to work because humans couldn’t see everything.
Agents can.
If you’re not the safest default or clearly the best, you’re just noise.
www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...
❤️ Right back at you
Fit width text in 1 line of CSS
`text-grow: per-line scale;`
nerdy.dev/css-text-grow
(prototype in Canary 165+)
Don't forget all the GEO-Detox work that will be paid for next year. The cycle of ""SEO"" life.
I’ve been getting pitched by companies who create markdown/“LLM-friendly” variants of webpages.
Curious to hear others’ perspectives on this (especially the longterm feasibility)…
The web you’re optimising for doesn’t exist anymore.
Most of what you publish will never make it to the surface - it’ll be scraped, compressed, and digested by machines that don’t see pages, only patterns.
I wrote about what this means for marketing.
www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...
Hah, love it. Yes.
A plumber drove past me with a Hotmail address on the side of his van.
For years, that would’ve been a red flag.
Now, in an age of AI-generated everything, it might be the most trustworthy thing I’ve seen all month.
www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/t...
Find someone who doesn't know your business. Show them your homepage for exactly 5 seconds. Then ask:
"What does this company do?"
"Who do they do it for?"
If they hesitate, get it wrong, or give vague answers, you've found your problem. And it's costing you rankings, traffic, and customers.
With View Transitions now being Baseline Newly available, and the View Transition API consisting of various features, it can be confusing to know what is supported in which browser versions.
To help with that, I created this VT Feature Explorer (powered by View Transitions)
web.dev/blog/same-do...
The web might change overnight. Are you ready?
On PodRocket, @jono.id makes the case for hedging our bets... not by chasing trends, but by doubling down on the fundamentals.
YT: buff.ly/xE4udjk
Apple: buff.ly/azaJQ9g
Spotify: buff.ly/YgpSFz4
I’ve been investigating dead websites for years.
Same symptoms every time - bloated code, missing structure, too many dependencies and not enough care.
It’s not murder. It’s neglect.
And it’s everywhere.
www.jonoalderson.com/misc/the-dea...
Yay ty!
Introducing the React Foundation
Ooh, got a link to the deck?
I mentioned before that we’re switching Lighthouse Performance audits to the new and improved Insights. The same Insights that you can see in DevTools Performance panel traces.
That’s happening in Lighthouse 13 due to be released very soon. Maybe even this week!
Yeah, this is super super cool
For some reason when people say 'potential audience' or 'ideal customer' I'm fine, but as soon as they say 'persona' I think they are being too cowardly to admit they enjoy astrology.
1. I am being unfair.
but also
2. I have never seen personas applied in a way that didn't leave me more confused.
Your brand isn’t what people say about you. It’s what machines remember about you. And they don’t forget.
Every slow page, broken checkout, and bad datapoint leaves a scar. Scars spread, harden, and make you invisible.
That’s the machine immune system at work.
www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/m...
My site passes! 😀
🚨 New tool: Impolighthouse
Not just “how fast is my site?”, but “why is it slow, and what does that say about our org?”
A deliberately impolite wrapper on top of Lighthouse, that calls out your organizational cruft, blockers & bad decisions.
www.jonoalderson.com/impolighthou...
