What I'm now doing is reducing the number of third party domains I call.
In essence, where I used to use cdnjs.cloudflare.com or whatever other externally hosted JS or CSS, I'm now mostly self-hosting, but still behind CloudFlare.
You can see this in action on https://www.lfgss.com/ which is now serving everything it can locally... only fonts and Persona really remain external.
I have been using preconnect hints to try and reduce the latency created by contacting those 3rd parties, but TBH the fact that I use SSL as much as possible meant that those connections take time to establish. In that time, most of the assets can be delivered over my already open connection.
There is an argument that cdnjs/Google CDN or whatever is better for the web, but personally I'm unconvinced. I think one should self-host/control all of the JavaScript that runs on your own site, and that unless the exact versions of the exact libs are cached in end user browsers the benefits are not even there.
This also looks to be a smarter thing to do anyway; the increasing prevalence of ad-blocking tech is impacting 3rd party hosted assets, and thus the experience of your users. You can mitigate that by self-hosting.
I haven't obliterated first-party extra domains, for example I still use a different domain for uploaded assets by users. This is a security thing, if I could safely do it I'd serve everything I can from just the one domain.
Basically: Self-host, http/2 has brought you the gift of speed to make that good again.
The first party extra domains use a different domain and .tld altogether.
A bit like how google.com is for maps and anything users upload go to googleusercontent.com.
LFGSS is served from www.lfgss.com and the user assets go via lfgss.microco.sm, and proxied user assets (another level of distrust altogether) are going via sslcache.se .
I own all of the domains, and they're on the same CloudFlare acount, but we don't yet offer ways to give users control over which domains get SNI'd together, and this is especially true when the domains are on different CloudFlare plans.
That said... it's cool. To reduce everything from 8 domains down to 3 or 4 is a significant enough improvement that I'm happy.
What I'm now doing is reducing the number of third party domains I call.
In essence, where I used to use cdnjs.cloudflare.com or whatever other externally hosted JS or CSS, I'm now mostly self-hosting, but still behind CloudFlare.
You can see this in action on https://www.lfgss.com/ which is now serving everything it can locally... only fonts and Persona really remain external.
I have been using preconnect hints to try and reduce the latency created by contacting those 3rd parties, but TBH the fact that I use SSL as much as possible meant that those connections take time to establish. In that time, most of the assets can be delivered over my already open connection.
There is an argument that cdnjs/Google CDN or whatever is better for the web, but personally I'm unconvinced. I think one should self-host/control all of the JavaScript that runs on your own site, and that unless the exact versions of the exact libs are cached in end user browsers the benefits are not even there.
This also looks to be a smarter thing to do anyway; the increasing prevalence of ad-blocking tech is impacting 3rd party hosted assets, and thus the experience of your users. You can mitigate that by self-hosting.
I haven't obliterated first-party extra domains, for example I still use a different domain for uploaded assets by users. This is a security thing, if I could safely do it I'd serve everything I can from just the one domain.
Basically: Self-host, http/2 has brought you the gift of speed to make that good again.