Improved Publishing Performance

Pre-rendering and compression

This release brings two improvements that can make your site up to 2X as fast.

1. When you publish your site, we pre-render a static HTML version on the server, so it loads faster and Google can analyze it for SEO (using React and SSR). We have optimized this process to use multiple CPUs on our server at the same time. Now, even sites with hundreds of pages can finish in seconds.

2. We serve your site from a global cache location close to your visitors to make sure your site loads fast. In addition, we use an advanced HTML and text compression algorithm called Brotli. Compressed content is now cached, so we can send it directly to your visitors instead of compressing each request individually. In our tests this often improves loading speed by up to 2x, which will have a very positive impact on your Lighthouse scores like LCP. This will be especially noticeable on larger sites, so you can scale your site without worry.

CSS optimization

We’ve also greatly improved the loading times of your websites. Sites now build and load faster because the CSS is minified with esbuild instead of csso. esbuild is much faster and better at de-duplicating certain advanced CSS rules, which means you will experience significantly lighter CSS files for complex pages. For our own site, we saw a 60% improvement in CSS size and a 4x speed up for optimization times. To get the same advantages, re-publish your site.