Website Optimization Measures, Part XXXIII

Published on Oct 1, 2025, filed under development, optimization. (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

Hey hey and welcome to this series in which I share improvements and lessons from the work on my projects, to allow you to choose what could benefit yours:

Updating http links. I must have mentioned this particular optimization measure before, because I’ve done this before, but, well: I went through meiert.com to update http links to https. This was needed after a lot of content had been in a database for up to 18 years. This particular clean-up took a lot of manual checking and tweaking, because as you can imagine, few of these links only required a protocol update (but also needed pointing to an archived version).
Creating Claude Code agents for consistency and typography. When I ran into subagents for Claude while scouting material for Frontend Dogma, I forced myself to set up at least two agents—one for code consistency, another for content accuracy and typography. Weeks later, I only recall putting them to action twice though.
Reviewing all project to-do items. I have an annual reminder to review all of my projects’ to-do items (which, if you’re curious, I mark “@@” personally, but “TODO” at work). This was incredibly effective and efficient this year, thanks largely to Claude Code. (AI absolutely shines at refactorings.) I will not delve into details, but this was the most productive annual to-do run I’ve ever had.
Something something websites. As part of my personal policy not to look on while other countries wage war and commit genocides (all while my home country forgets our lesson from the Holocaust), I’ve taken additional steps to block warmongering and genocidal actors.
Reviewing local config files. I test-drive quite a bit, whether that’s around HTML optimization (e.g., framework HTML defaults or validator packages) or AI (e.g., building with AI). What I only realized the other week is that much of that tooling has been leaving a footprint in my user folder, that is, all sorts of config dot files. I cleaned up.
Uninstalling Oh My Zsh plugins. I use Oh My Zsh, and I also use plugins like git and npm. Or so I thought—because it took me until reviewing what these plugins do that I noticed they’re just collections of aliases, aliases that I tend to set up myself, or aliases I don’t need. Well.
Disabling “git maintenance.” In WOM XXIII I was still talking about git maintenance; I think I botched really reviewing its impact so that eventually, I turned it off everywhere after suspecting it to impact performance rather negatively. As unscientific as I went about this, I won’t be able to tell.
What I really needed, it turned out a few hours after taking this note, may have been git clean (in conjunction with npm ci). But this, now, I’m also still testing 😬
Optimizing rsync performance. I use rsync in a few places. One of my defaults for local operations was rsync -a --quiet --delete …. I challenged this and found that rsync -rltD --inplace --quiet --delete --one-file-system … would be a suitable optimization to speed things up. I’ll leave all the whys open! 🤷‍♂️
Cleaning up Node installations. Another reminder thing—that is, something I do every n months—, I’ve been using nvm to nvm list and nvm uninstall x to remove old Node installs. I then found this time-consuming enough to Claude-code a bash script to clean up by one command only. (Happy to share as a gist if there’s interest.)

This is a part of an open article series. Check out some of the other optimization posts!

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you’ve never heard of and companies you use every day, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)