Most developers appreciate and rely on the productivity boost that comes from using open source or otherwise off the shelf web frameworks and component libraries. One can build sophisticated web applications very quickly without getting bogged down crafting custom components and wrestling with css. Most of the time we end up implicitly trading user experience for speed of development. Time To First Byte, First Contentful Paint, and excessive DOM size are a few key user experience metrics that product teams should be tracking and optimizing 1. Bounce rate for web applications that fail to optimize for the aforementioned metrics is unsurprisingly high 234. The impact of not optimizing for these is felt more acutely in Global South where broadband penetration is well below that of developed nations 56. It does not help that most data centers are usually located far away from users most impacted; until recently Google had no servers in Africa. Additionally, it is not uncommon for users to be accessing web applications on lower powered mobile devices over pay per kilobyte plans 7. Teams targeting users predominantly in the Global South should consider the impact of their technology choices on their end users.

Things to consider:

• Avoid poorly optimized frameworks (or frameworks altogether if possible)
• Use a CDN with nodes in your target regions
• Implement chunking for large single page apps
• Configure tree shaking in your bundler to remove dead code 8
• Server side rendering
• System Fonts over font loading
• Avoid dynamic frontend framework for static websites