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by cantSpellSober 1383 days ago
> Is it [...] pragmatically worthwhile

YES! It affects e-commerce conversion rates measurably.

Great point by the author: "make sure it’s the right thing to focus on." Hobby site? Don't care about FOUC. E-commerce? It's a game-changer.

> The brief flash of your half-styled website is useless to me

Not to the rest our users though! Are you on a 3G connection in a third-world country? If not your experience may be not be shared but every user.

1 comments

I am confused, are you for or against FOUC? Or for optimizing against it?

My core industry is e-commerce, have been doing it for over a decade. Our fastest sites are the fully cached, single CSS file sites. You get sent a small amount of CSS and HTML, and you are off to the races. Javascript comes later, and is not necessary to operate the site until checkout.

What kills a sites speed for us is usually shitty CDNs and bloated assets, we don't have those. There isn't a single e-commerce platform popular today that I feel does this well, but that is because they are all enterprise platforms full of enterprise features.

I'm against FOUC when it matters, and for optimizing CSS when it's the right thing to focus on.

On hobby sites it doesn't matter. On high volume e-commerce it does.