Hot take: That viral CSS animation library everyone loves broke my client project

I was building a landing page for a local coffee shop in Austin last month and everyone was raving about this new animation library. I figured I'd use it to make their menu pop. Three hours into implementation, the whole thing crashed on an older iPhone 8 that one of the owners was using to demo the site. The animations were so heavy they killed the load time from 2 seconds to 12 seconds. I ended up ripping out the entire library and doing simple fade-ins with vanilla CSS instead. The site ran smooth and the client was way happier with the clean look. Has anyone else had a hyped tool backfire like that in production?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_price5d ago

Same thing happened to me with a restaurant site. Went back to simple CSS animations and it was way better.

the_wendy5d ago

Oh man, that restaurant site thing hit home for me. We had this bakery client that wanted their homepage to have all these particle effects and floating images, and it was a total mess on older phones. Spent like 3 days debugging frame drops before I just ripped it all out and used basic CSS fade-ins with a 200ms delay on each section. Looked cleaner and loaded faster too. Sometimes simple really does win.