Improve page load times

[fallax]

There are a number of tools we can use to analyse page load times to improve them.

https://varvy.com/pagespeed/
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/

These give a number of recommendations. Some of these have already been implemented, some have not. With some (e.g. inlining CSS) it is very difficult to tell if they are actually useful suggestions or not when it comes to real page speed - experiments I've done so far have been very inconclusive and seemed to suggest this might actually increase page load time.

At a minimum we should be using gzip compression and HTTP/2 as this is an easy change if we switch to CloudFront.

[fallax]

See also

#111
and
#112
and
#49

[fallax]

Current 1.3 lighthouse scores on live site (mobile):

Home page: LCP 1.4 CLS 0 Perf 100 Accessibility 100 Best Practices 93
Voice category: LCP 1.2 CLS 0.249 Perf 97 Accessibility 97 Best Practices 93
Speech therapy: LCP 1.2 CLS 0.262 Perf 97 Accessibility 97 Best Practices 93

[fallax]

1.3.1

Home page: LCP 1.3 CLS 0 Perf 100 Accessibility 100 Best Practices 93
Voice category: LCP 1.7 CLS 0 Perf 100 Accessibility 100 Best Practices 93
Speech therapy: LCP 1.9 CLS 0 Perf 100 Accessibility 100 Best Practices 93

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1.3.2
Home page LCP 2.1 CLS 0 Perf 99 Accessibility 100 Best Practices 100
Voice category: LCP 2.1 CLS 0 Perf 99 Accessibility 100 Best Practices 100
Speech therapy: LCP 1.8 CLS 0 Perf 99 Accessibility 100 Best Practices 100

LCP times are extremely variable and don't seem to be an especially useful metric. Closing this as it is very difficult to tell whether any given change is making things better or worse.