Why this site ships zero-JS-ish: SvelteKit + mdsvex
20 September 2025 · 4 min read
- Sveltekit
- Mdsvex
- Performance
The stack
- SvelteKit 2 with the static adapter (
adapter-static) — every route prerenders to plain files at build time - mdsvex — Markdown pages become real Svelte components at build time, so blog posts can include interactive islands when needed, and none otherwise
- Tailwind v4, CSS-first config, no runtime cost
- Zero analytics, zero client state, one component tree
Why this matters
A personal site’s job is: load fast, be readable, get out of the way. The typical React-portfolio-of-the-week ships ~600 KB of JS for a hero paragraph. This entire site’s client bundle is a rounding error by comparison, which matters more on hotel wifi than in a benchmark lab.
mdsvex is the secret sauce
Posts are plain .md files with frontmatter:
---
title: 'Hello world'
date: '2025-09-20'
---
Hello.import.meta.glob + mdsvex turns them into typed, metadata-carrying,
preview-able modules at build time. Listings, RSS, sitemap, and JSON-LD
structured data all read from the same module. No CMS, no backend, no build
race-condition department.
Limitations
- Multi-language routing and content-sets get verbose at scale — if your site is 5k posts, this stops being the best tool
- Authenticated routes need a server; this site has none
Ship it anyway. Static works.