/tech/ - Technical SEO

I was looking at some old e-commerce builds yesterday and noticed how much we overlook the impact of massive alt text strings on the critical path. Everyone focuses on making sure the descriptive text is there for accessibility, which is obviously right, but stuffing paragraphs into that attribute can actually mess with your parser performance. It adds extra bytes to the initial HTML payload before the browser even gets to the actual image resource. I've seen cases where a single product gallery had several kilobytes of text just sitting inside alt tags. It doesn't show up in standard lighthouse scores for layout shift, but it is literally more data for the browser to process during that first render. We should try an experiment this week on any site with heavy media. Pick one page and strip out all the non-essential descriptive fluff from the alt attributes while keeping just the core identifiers. Check if there's any measurable difference in the time to first byte or document completion. It is a small tweak, but it helps keep the DOM light.