korindiehacker rebuilt Bloffy’s public blog pages with Hono, a lightweight web framework, after finding that Next.js still sent JavaScript to pages with no interaction. The management app remains on Next.js.
Caching and smaller images came first. Cloudflare’s content delivery network served cached pages near visitors, while its image transformations handled resizing and compression. Those changes brought scores close to the target, but framework code remained.
- Removing every client component from the Next.js 16.1.6 version did not improve the score, the author reports. The App Router still shipped browser code.
- The Next.js page showed 230,460 bytes of unused JavaScript in the author’s coverage report. The Hono version shipped no JavaScript and showed 407 bytes of unused code.
- A measured task before rendering fell from 309.3 ms to 68.01 ms. Build time also fell by about 40%, according to the author.
- The final page reportedly reached 100 in all four Lighthouse categories: performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
A reading page can keep a productive server-side framework without sending an application framework to the browser. Here, Hono retained JSX templates while dropping the browser runtime that the public pages did not need.
Caveat: these are the platform creator’s own measurements and product pitch. A perfect Lighthouse run is a lab result, not proof of every visitor’s experience.