How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
SMRTR summary
A young woman sits in a London housing benefits office, clutching a PlayStation Portable, not playing games but researching her housing rights on a browser so outdated it can barely load three tabs. That image drove one developer to rethink everything about how public-facing web applications get built.
When a UK utility company came to him with a broken, inaccessible React app that had been pulled after just three days, he went back to basics, building an HTML-first form using Astro, where JavaScript only enhanced what already worked perfectly without it.
The results were striking. When the new version launched, the number of users completing the form doubled overnight. Analytics teams were baffled, because javascript-based tracking never counted the users who had been quietly turned away all along.
One user even completed a form a month after starting it, thanks to server-side session storage.
The developer's parting thought is a challenge to the entire industry: "Build a web application that works on a PlayStation Portable on a 3G connection, if you do, it will work for all your users."
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to lobste.rs.
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