So, I previously blogged about how we hosted CraftCMS on Heroku. When we built the marketing site for Quala the twig templates were built for maximum authoring flexibility at the cost of some TTFB problems. We knew this going into the project. In an ideal world we would use GatsbyJS to build the frontend, but we very limited in time. When we went live, we saw a dramatic improvement to First Contentful paint, but a huge decrease to Time To First Byte, averaging at 1.3 seconds.

So, incase you are unfamiliar, there is a meta tag called <meta name="theme-color" content="..."> that is used to change the color of the navbar on desktop safari, mobile safari, and mobile chrome. If you don't set a value these browsers tend to find a color that match the site to the best of their ability. However, sometimes even setting the value can cause the site to look ugly.

So, like most early startups, Quala (where I currently work) bought into a Wordpress site to sell our product, probably before it really existed. Flash forward, we have customers, and we're on a path to building a platform to change the game on customer management. The Wordpress site was terrible for performance, and core web vitals. None of us know Wordpress, and barely know any php. We had huge drive to rebrand ourselves, but to do that we needed to edit the Wordpress theme 😬 or use something else.