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What a chat widget costs your page

Most chat widgets are measured in hundreds of kilobytes and load before your content. This hub covers the other approach: one file, measured on every build against a budget the build enforces, deferred so it blocks nothing, and rendered in a shadow root so it cannot cause layout shift in your theme.

What this hub covers

  • Measuring bundle size honestly
  • Loading after paint
  • Core Web Vitals
  • Dropping dependencies you do not need

Start here

We dropped GSAP and got 31kB back for thirty lines of code: two smooth waves crossing the frame, one thin grey and one thick brand-coloured, over a pale background
Engineering

We dropped GSAP and got 31kB back for thirty lines of code

GSAP plus SplitText is 31kB gzipped. The one thing we used it for was a staggered word reveal on a headline, which turns out to be about thirty lines of DOM and one CSS transition.

5 min read

Related topic hubs

Named across this hub: Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse, gzip, Brotli.

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