--- title: "How I built this site: near-perfect PageSpeed, no framework" description: "The practical recipe behind this site's PageSpeed scores: hand-written static HTML, self-hosted fonts, webp images and one _headers file, deployed free to Cloudflare's edge." author: Stephen Sumner date: 2026-06-17 modified: 2026-09-18 canonical: https://stephensumner.com/blog/how-this-site-is-built/ --- # How I built this site: near-perfect PageSpeed, no framework *No WordPress, no JavaScript framework, no bundler. Hand-written static HTML, self-hosted fonts and images, one short script at deploy time and a single file of edge configuration — served from Cloudflare for free. The result is a clean 100 for SEO, accessibility and best practices. Here is the whole recipe, updated for what the platform can do in 2026.* By Stephen Sumner · Published 2026-06-17 · Updated 2026-09-18 · Canonical: https://stephensumner.com/blog/how-this-site-is-built/ I tell clients to build fast, clean sites. It would be a poor look if my own were slow, so when I rebuilt this one I held it to the standard I hold theirs to: open it in Google's [PageSpeed Insights](https://pagespeed.web.dev/), run it, and don't ship until the numbers are honest. Here is exactly what they came back as — desktop and mobile, unedited. PageSpeed Insights · stephensumner.com Lighthouse · 17 June 2026 Mobile ![PageSpeed Insights mobile scores for stephensumner.com: Performance 93, Accessibility 100, Best Practices 100, SEO 100, Agentic Browsing 3 of 3.](https://stephensumner.com/blog/how-this-site-is-built/assets/pagespeed-mobile.webp) Desktop ![PageSpeed Insights desktop scores for stephensumner.com: Performance 99, Accessibility 100, Best Practices 100, SEO 100, Agentic Browsing 3 of 3.](https://stephensumner.com/blog/how-this-site-is-built/assets/pagespeed-desktop.webp) **The real numbers, not a cherry-picked screenshot.** A clean 100 for SEO, Accessibility and Best Practices on both, and a 3/3 pass on Agentic Browsing. The only score below 100 is Performance — 99 on desktop, 93 on mobile, where Lighthouse throttles to a slow connection and a weak CPU. I'll come back to that one honestly rather than pretend it's perfect. None of this needed a clever trick. It came from a handful of unglamorous decisions, made in order, each of which I can hand to you below. If you build sites, you can copy the lot. If you'd rather not, that's a service I can potentially help you with. ## Fast is a subtraction problem The single most useful idea in web performance is that speed is mostly about what you *leave out*. Every framework, every analytics tag, every web font, every "just one more" script is weight the browser has to fetch, parse and run before a visitor sees anything. Most slow sites aren't slow because of one big mistake; they're slow because of forty small additions nobody removed. So the brief I set myself was almost rude in its simplicity: a personal site is text, a few images and a couple of small interactions. It does not need a render pipeline, a hydration step or a 200 KB JavaScript bundle. Strip the project back to what the content actually requires, and the scores mostly take care of themselves. Most slow sites aren't slow because of one big mistake. They're slow because of forty small additions nobody removed. 0 JS frameworks ~8 KB Total site JS 0 Third-party requests 3×100 SEO · A11y · Best Practices ## Step 1 · Build it as static HTML There is no CMS behind this site and no framework in front of it. Each page is a hand-written `.html` file with the critical CSS inlined in the ``, so the browser can render the page from the very first response without waiting on a separate stylesheet. The markup is semantic — real `
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