This Is My Biggest Website Mistake

Aug 19, 2025

It seems to me that the person writing a blog probably wants to talk about their greatest successes. Meanwhile the person reading it might prefer to read about the failures. In the years I have run this website, I have made many changes, and some of those changes have not been beneficial.

To restate, those changes were mistakes. Consider the era in 2015 when I decided to use JavaScript to try to improve the site. I would use async JavaScript to generate pages client-side. In 2015, JavaScript compilers were advancing quickly, and website owners wanted to benefit from this new technology.

Content websites should stick to static HTML, CSS and media files. When I moved to a JavaScript-heavy website layout:

The site became slower for users.

Web crawlers had more difficulty figuring out the content of my pages.

I had to spend a significant amount of time fixing issues with JSON encoding, JavaScript errors, and general software problems.

So using JavaScript too much on a content site like this one was a clear failure. It consumed more time than I wanted, and it made things worse for all consumers of the site. I learned my lesson: for content-heavy sites, stick with static HTML and CSS along with media files (like WEBP).

Dot Net Perls is a collection of pages with code examples, which are updated to stay current. Programming is an art, and it can be learned from examples.

Donate to this site to help offset the costs of running the server. Sites like this will cease to exist if there is no financial support for them.

Sam Allen is passionate about computer languages, and he maintains 100% of the material available on this website. He hopes it makes the world a nicer place.

An RSS feed is available for this blog.

Home

Changes