Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category
I wanted a blog as fast as Bear Blog but with more features. After caching and image optimization, Next.js still shipped legacy JavaScript and unused code—230KB of it—even on static pages. So I ripped out Next.js for Hono, cut unused code to 407 bytes, sped up the long task by 78%, and hit perfect scores across the board.
At first I suspected hydration, but once I dug in, the problem wasn’t hydration alone. The cause was the client runtime that Next.js always ships, even for static pages.