I took a very bold decision and built a new version of the site using Astro https://astro.build/. It was HTML-first. Javascript existed, in web components, but only to progressively-enhance a website that worked perfectly fine without it.
My logic was thus:
This is a public service
It should work on every machine possible
It should work when connections are poor
The forms must never lose data once it is entered
…
The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It was a flood! We also saw my “keep a backend session, never lose user data” approach pay off. In one case, someone completed a form a month after starting it.
considering that I run with noscript on permanently, if the site immediately breaks, I just close the tab. if the site generally works, I will take the time to consider if JS is warranted. thank you for making sites that dont break the web.
considering that I run with noscript on permanently, if the site immediately breaks, I just close the tab. if the site generally works, I will take the time to consider if JS is warranted. thank you for making sites that dont break the web.
absolutely not me with 200 tabs open, doing 30 things at the same time
200 tabs is amateur hour. Gotta pump those numbers up.