A calm site that is also light

On 28 October 2026 we ran a free page checker over seventeen pages of this site, in English and in Hebrew, at phone size and at desktop size. Most scores were 100. A few were not, and we say which below.

A site with a big picture, soft glows and drifting sparks can easily become heavy. We had already seen what too much movement looks like in our first design, so this story is about how we kept the look and kept the weight down.

Key points

• The motion is gentle, and it switches off for visitors whose devices ask for less motion.
• Pictures use a smaller image format, fonts come from our own site, and pages are built ahead of time.
• On 28 October 2026, accessibility, best practices and search visibility (SEO) scored 100 on all seventeen pages we checked.
• Performance scored 100 at desktop size. On a simulated phone it first scored 91 to 99, and after we trimmed pictures and fonts, 94 to 100.

Movement that does not cost much

The motion on this site is small on purpose: things lift a little when you point at them, and a slow trail of sparks drifts by. It is all made with the page’s own style rules, with no animation program running in the background.

We also changed the glow around the cards so it only moves things that the computer’s graphics hardware can move with little effort. And when a visitor’s device says it prefers less motion, every one of these movements is switched off.

Pictures, fonts and pages

• Pictures are saved in a newer format that makes the same picture smaller.
• Fonts come from this site itself, so the page does not wait for another website.
• Style rules (how things look) are placed inside each page, so the browser does not wait for a second file before it can draw the page.
• Pages are built once, ahead of time. Opening one is just sending a file.
• Files that never change are kept (cached) by the visitor’s browser for a year.
• The accessibility menu and the cookie notice were first built as interactive pieces that need extra code to run. We rewrote them as plain HTML (the basic language of web pages) and a small script (a short piece of code), so they add almost nothing to the page.

How we checked

We used Lighthouse (opens in a new tab), a free checker that scores a page for speed, accessibility, good practices and search visibility (SEO).

We did not run it against a plain test server. A plain server serves files differently from our real host, and that measures the test instead of the site.

So our check runs a local copy that serves files the way the host does, compressed (made smaller to send) and with the same rules for what the browser may keep. We corrected the check script itself within an hour of adding it.

What it said

On 28 October 2026, across seventeen pages in both languages, including these stories:

• accessibility, best practices and search visibility scored 100 on every page, at both sizes;
• performance scored 100 at desktop size on every page;
• performance on a simulated phone connection (the checker pretends to be a slow phone on a slow connection) was lower: between 91 and 99, over two runs.

On the simulated phone, the largest visible part of each page appeared after 2.0 to 3.2 seconds over the two runs. On desktop it was under a second. The simulated phone is deliberately slow, but a number below 100 is still a number below 100, and we would rather tell you than round it up.

Trimming after the first run

We did not leave it there. A simulated slow phone counts everything that downloads before the page first appears on screen, so weight is what sets the score. We trimmed three things:

• pictures are saved at a lower quality, and the home picture went from 67 KB to 40 KB;
• fonts for parts of the page nobody sees yet, the closed accessibility menu and on phones the footer, are no longer downloaded early;
• two small font files no longer sit inside the styling of every page.

After that, phone-size performance over three runs on 28 October was between 94 and 100, and in our own run the largest visible part of each page appeared after 1.7 to 2.4 seconds. Not every page reached 100. What is left is mostly the fonts that give the site its look, and we chose to keep them.

What we take from it

The calm look and the light pages did not pull against each other. Every effect we kept costs very little, and where an effect cost more, such as the glow that travelled around the cards, we changed it.