Over the past few weeks I made a series of improvements to this site. Nothing dramatic from the outside, but a meaningful cleanup under the hood. Here’s a quick overview of what changed and why.

Dropping Google Analytics

The most straightforward change: I removed Google Analytics. Lighthouse flagged 60 KiB of unused JavaScript loaded from Google’s servers on every page visit. Beyond the performance cost, it felt inconsistent to run a site about privacy while silently shipping a third-party tracker. Gone.

Forking the Theme

This site uses hello-friend-ng as its theme. Over time I accumulated layout overrides scattered across the site’s layouts/ directory. Rather than maintain a parallel set of overrides, I forked the theme into Reijnn/hugo-theme-hello-friend-ng and consolidated the changes there. The site-level layouts/ directory now only holds what is genuinely site-specific (like robots.txt), while everything else lives in the fork. This makes the relationship between site and theme much easier to reason about.

Dropping Vite for Hugo’s Native Asset Pipeline

The JS build was previously handled by Vite, which added configuration overhead and an extra build step. Hugo has had a capable built-in asset pipeline for a while — it can bundle, minify, fingerprint, and generate SRI hashes. Switching to it removed Vite and its config entirely, moved JS sources into assets/ where Hugo expects them, and let me delete a bunch of glue code.

As part of this I also migrated from config.toml to hugo.toml and tightened the Content-Security-Policy in firebase.json.

Lighthouse Optimizations

With the foundation in place I went through a Lighthouse pass:

  • Inlined the typewriter script on the homepage. It was loaded as a separate file, causing a 499ms critical request chain. Inlining it as an IIFE in the HTML eliminates the extra round-trip.
  • Added font preload hints for Inter Regular and Bold, so the browser fetches fonts earlier in the page load.
  • Fixed absolute font paths in the theme fork to make sure fonts resolve correctly regardless of the base URL.
  • Fixed footer contrast to meet WCAG AA requirements — the footer text wasn’t passing the contrast ratio check.

Small changes, but the site is faster, more private, and easier to maintain going forward.