I’ve been thinking about how web apps nowadays seem to pack many features—from dark mode to animations, rich client-side interactions, offline support and more. All of this is great, but I keep wondering: at what point do these extras hurt performance or the user experience?
A few things I’m curious about:
Do developers here ever delay implementing a “nice extra” because it slows down load time?
What metrics or tools do you use to measure whether a feature is “too expensive” in terms of performance (mobile especially)?
Are there features you’ve removed / scaled back after noticing performance issues?
How do you decide which features are “must-have” and which are “nice-to-have” when building something new?
For me, I recently removed complex animations from a project because they made the mobile version sluggish, especially on older devices. Would love to hear your stories, trade-offs, and how you strike a balance.
A “feature” I have removed is all types of frameworks. You get a backpack of tools that you have to load every time, but you may never use. Clean code is faster and smaller, though it may take longer time to market.
Dark mode shouldn’t add a lot to a website: a bit of extra CSS, that’s all.
Similarly simple animations are just a few extra lines of CSS. If an animation adds something to the users experience it’s worth having; where you should avoid them is when they become gratuitous.
Adding offline features shouldn’t hurt a website’s performance as your service worker will be caching assets, and that might even improve performance.
How do you all handle third-party scripts, like analytics or ad services? I find that they often have a huge impact on performance, and it feels like a necessary evil . Any tips for managing them without hurting load times ?
. Any tips for managing them without hurting load times 
?