The Hurricane Web | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

When a storm comes, some of the big news sites like CNN and NPR strip down to a zippy performant text-only version that delivers the content without the bells and whistles.

I’d argue though that in some aspects, they are actually better than the original.

The numbers:

The “full” NPR site in comparison takes ~114 requests and weighs close to 3MB on average. Time to first paint is around 20 seconds on slow connections. It includes ads, analytics, tracking scripts and social media widgets.

Meanwhile, the actual news content is roughly the same.

I quite like the idea of storm-driven development.

…websites built for a storm do not rely on Javascript. The benefit simply does not outweigh the cost. They rely on resilient HTML, because that’s all that is really necessary here.