Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category

A solo developer set out to build a blogging platform combining Bear Blog’s speed with more features and a better editor, after finding services such as Medium, Blogger, WordPress, Ghost, and Hugo unsatisfactory for different reasons. The resulting site initially used Next.js, with caching and Cloudflare’s CDN and image transformations to improve delivery and keep image processing manageable. Those steps produced strong Lighthouse results, but not perfect scores. An audit revealed that much of the downloaded JavaScript was unused framework code, despite the pages being static and rendered with server components.

Removing client components did not solve the problem: Next.js still shipped runtime code for its router, error handling, links, and images, and there was no supported way to eliminate it all. The developer therefore replaced Next.js with Hono, retaining a framework while avoiding the client runtime. The new version scored 100 in every Lighthouse category, reduced unused JavaScript from 230,460 bytes to 407 bytes, and cut build time by about 40%. In a comparison of the same page, the long task before rendering fell from 309.3 milliseconds with Next.js to 68.01 milliseconds with Hono, roughly 78% faster. The central argument is that static sites usually gain little from JavaScript hydration and may be better served without Next.js; the developer still considers it a good fit for interaction-heavy applications and uses it for the platform’s management app.