Last week I gave a talk at AlpineDay entitled "From Vue to Alpine: How & Why". I put up my slides from my AlpineDay talk, "From Vue to Alpine: How & Why":https://t.co/xTzIl0FGunAnd also the files I used to test performance:https://t.co/tB5EThfEEJ pic.twitter.com/Jv8P7iDBcv— Matt Stauffer (@stauffermatt) June 10, 2021 In the talk I shared a few situations in which I've moved applications that were previously using Vue to use Alpine instead, for the sake of Google's Core Web Vitals. These sites were using Vue for light enhancements on top of a server-rendered app, and I found that Alpine is lighter to load and parse in these cases. I still stand by everything I said in the talk. However, a large swath of the Internet discovered my slides, hadn't heard the talk, and assumed I was badmouthing Vue. So, I wanted to write a post about how we can optimize our usage of Vue for this same scenario! How do we minimize Vue's impact on the Core Web Vitals? When Vue is too heavy In my talk, I described working on the Tighten website to improve its Core Web Vitals scores. For that particular site, we were using Vue for some very small components, and the combination of Vue's loading time and the components' initial processing time in the browser led to a significant delay for loading the page. I discovered I could solve our problem by replacing those components with Alpine components, and realized — and then gave a talk about this idea — that Alpine is an ideal fit, even for a Vue-loving agency like ours, for enhancements above vanilla JavaScript and below heavy dashboards and SPAs. Gimme my Vue! However, many of our sites — and likely yours, if you're reading this — are ideal for Vue, so we're not just going to drop it. Instead, let's look: can we optimize our page load speeds? There's a whole group of answers that have to do with code splitting and async loading, which you can find a link to down at the bottom of this post. But there are two strategies that are very similar to what I talked about in my talk, so they're the ones I'm going to cover in this talk. Making Vue load faster If you define your Vue components inline in your HTML (rather than in single-file components), it turns out this requires a heavier (larger file download) and slower (more processing power spent) version of Vue. This version has an in-browser compiler, which causes the impact to load size and processing time. I talked briefly with Evan You, the creator of Vue, who taught me that the "runtime-only" version (meaning, with no compiler) of Vue is 2/3rd the download size of the full Vue. He also gave me two ideas for how we can shrink Vue's load size and processing time. 1. Pre-compile your templates and use the "runtime" Vue build As I mentioned above, if Vue is going to have to compile Vue component definitions from your HTML, it has to include an in-browser compiler, which makes the script file larger and the proces