Home/Notes/page weight: a field note from a driving school
page weight: a field note from a driving school
6 Apr 2026
How a driving school deals with page weight — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: TTL of 300 seconds. page weight slows the page for a driving school.
We deployed a fix for page weight at 5 PM on a Friday. It worked, but if it had not, we would have had no one available. We no longer push to production after Thursday noon.
The real issue was not page weight itself — it was TTL of 300 seconds. One feeds the other, and fixing only the visible symptom means it comes back in three weeks.
Every technical decision for a driving school comes back to one question: does this help the person looking at the site right now? If page weight is invisible to that person, it is working.
A form that collects data for a driving school should say where the message goes. Nine fields and a captcha on a quiet Tuesday will cost you the person who actually wanted to pay.
Complexity is the enemy of uptime. a driving school had three layers of proxy in front of a site that gets two hundred visits a day. We replaced it with a static page and correct page weight.
A friend of the owner at a driving school had set up page weight years ago. When we audited, the config still pointed at a server they stopped paying for in 2024.
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