Moving away from Nuxt to Eleventy

This is an internal discussion at LOGIC's GitHub, retrofited to share with the public.

Hey @withlogicco/hq,

After a discussion with Antonis, we have decided to move away from Nuxt for all of LOGIC’s projects, which include our marketing website and State of Progress.

Why we decided to leave Nuxt

The main reason for this is the unacceptable performance of Nuxt, which affects us in multiple important ways. First, it can crash our dynamically generated pages on Cloudflare Workers by exceeding the available resource limits:

Next, building takes about a minute at best, both locally and on CI with GitHub Actions, with a warm cache. We even considered swapping Node for Bun as the JavaScript runtime to potentially to boost performance. The results, were disappointing (copy paste from a local test):

real    1m16.458s
user    0m43.480s
sys     0m33.203s

real    0m37.502s
user    0m21.429s
sys     0m19.401s

real    0m38.357s
user    0m57.248s
sys     0m6.420s

real    0m33.767s
user    0m54.951s
sys     0m7.456s

real    0m41.332s
user    1m1.606s
sys     0m6.393s

real    0m35.451s
user    0m57.939s
sys     0m7.885s

Finally, this is on top of a subpar local development experience, where pages take an eternity to load at first and error messages can be exhaustingly obscure.

Next

The best candidate for replacement right now is Eleventy, which we are already using successfully in production for https://mikrikouventa.fm and https://jobcard.gr. It also has a wonderful build time of about 3 seconds on CI (about 1/20th of Nuxt), while the Mikri Kouventa podcast website has by far the most pages among all of our statically generated content.

We also have some ideas for additional tooling on top of Eleventy to make the experience even better and introduce new functionality that we might be missing on Nuxt.

Planning of this migration will start within the week and hopefully we will complete it within the month — after all, most of our content is Markdown!

Closing thoughts

There is absolutely no reason to spend that much time waiting for a bunch of HTML pages to be generated, fail to serve our web visitors or try to the performance of our tooling. We are moving forward.

This is also an incredible opportunity to build great tech. Let’s go.

If your company is interested in leveling up its internal tooling, DevOps practices and development speed, get in touch with. We would love to help.