Page Asset Performance — Step 1: Solution Assessment

Problem Statement

After theme splitting, standard pages still ship shared CSS, scripts, inline critical CSS, and static-artifact assets that may not serve their route; reduce transfer and parse cost without minifying source assets.

Option A: Extract About as a page-CSS pilot

Move the About-only .about-section rules into an About stylesheet and add per-page CSS support to the standard layout.

Pros:

• Small, low-risk proof of the shared page-asset mechanism.

• Immediately stops non-About routes loading About glyphs and layout rules.

Cons:

• Leaves the larger CSS, script, and artifact opportunities untouched.

• Repeated one-page changes can create inconsistent asset ownership.

Option B: Route-family CSS and JavaScript ownership pass

Create shared route-family asset contracts and extract every selector/script whose template use is exclusive to that family.

Pros:

• Captures About plus the current page-specific CSS and layout-wide no-op scripts.

• Keeps assets readable and cacheable without a bundling/minification system.

Cons:

• Requires a complete ownership inventory and route regression coverage.

• Extra requests can outweigh savings for very small assets if grouped poorly.

Option C: Measured non-minification performance program

Combine route-family assets with critical-CSS reduction, HTML/payload review, deferred heavy tooling assets, and static-artifact/deployment hygiene, guided by page-size and request measurements.

Pros:

• Addresses CSS bytes, HTML bytes, JavaScript execution, and artifact bloat together.

• Makes prioritization evidence-based and protects each improvement with budgets.

Cons:

• Too broad for one implementation pass; should be delivered as focused follow-up stages.

• Some gains depend on server/CDN configuration outside application code.

Recommendation

Option C, starting with Option B's route-asset contracts and the About pilot. The companion inventory identifies the complete current source-level opportunity set; use measurements to select the first small implementation feature, beginning with shared per-page CSS support and about.css.

Inventory: non-minification performance inventory.

Reply Approved Step 1 to proceed to the feature description.