Jens Oliver Meiert

Website Optimization Measures, Part XXXVI

Published on Mar 12, 2026, filed under , . (Share this post, e.g. on Mastodon or on Bluesky.)

Welcome to part 36 of this blog series in which I share improvements and lessons from the work on my projects, to illustrate the value of continuous maintenance—and for you to pick what may be useful for your projects:

  1. Optimizing GitHub Actions expenses. While I enjoy a free plan for GitHub Copilot that I do not understand, I’m mindful of the resources I consume. For that reason, I try to check on my usage. There, I eventually noticed a significant cost for GitHub Actions using macOS. To limit this cost, I updated the respective workflows only to run when pushing and merging to the main branch. You can see an example in my tests workflow for ObsoHTML.

  2. Reviewing articles on the need for headings. I’m writing a lot, but I’m also always learning to write better. One habit I’m working on: improving my use of headings. (This article may be a case in point—I’ve contemplated a few times whether all these optimization steps should be sections that each have a heading.) What I’ve been doing is walking through all meiert.com articles, adding headings where they were most obviously missing.

  3. Testing Gcore CDN. As part of an operation to move away from US services, I’m also testing alternatives to AWS CloudFront. My favorite so far is Gcore, to which I’ve migrated The Other Manifesto. The metrics (as per WebPageTest) indicate not the fast performance as AWS—but still better performance than using no CDN (and that for free).

  4. Provisioning local spellcheckers. As a blogger and author, my codebase is full of content. Not all of it has to and does go through review, yet typos are the least I try to avoid. To improve my overall setup and process, I looked for system tools to use, and found one I’m now test-driving: cspell.

  5. Cleaning up GitHub branches. Oh gosh. Yes. Why is auto-deleting head branches not a default?

    GitHub’s “Automatically delete head branches” setting.
    Click me.

  6. Revising acronym punctuation… In my own style guide, I had some exceptions for acronyms: I used periods for cases like “U.N.”, “U.S.”, “U.K.” This was inconsistent and ultimately looked like it would never stop—why not continue with “E.U.”, for example? I dropped the practice, ending up searching all projects to do away with the exceptions.

  7. Removing BingSiteAuth.xml files. Don’t ask me why I’d care about Bing or why I didn’t do this earlier: I knew but never really mentally “processed” being able to import my sites from the Google Search Console to Bing Webmaster Tools until one day this February, I did. While it didn’t mean to move away from either US solution yet, I finally took action by removing all BingSiteAuth.xml files that were previously needed to verify site ownership in Bing. One less maintenance task to worry about.

  8. Further optimizing Eleventy performance. I threw AI at two of my Eleventy projects again, that is, meiert.com and Frontend Dogma. For meiert.com, I accomplished a breakthrough in terms of dealing with git Last Modified—I shared my findings and a workaround. For Frontend Dogma, I could squeeze about 10% out of build and export time—but the optimizations are too specific to share here. I do recommend, however, to use coding agents to probe for optimizations like this.

  9. Refactoring site searches to use Qwant. As another measure to replace US services, I stopped using Google’s custom search. As I shared on Mastodon, this meant a switch to Qwant (France), after I had previously already updated many search links to point to Startpage (from the Netherlands).

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

About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on March 2, 2026.

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you use every day (like Google) and companies you’ve never heard of, 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 with respect to politics and philosophy. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my experiences and perspectives. (Please share feedback: Interpret charitably, but do be critical.)