updated · 4 min read · Plaintext Version
ai facelift
Sure we can do it - but sometimes AI can do it quicker and better.
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- Modern tools like Jules and Vite can quickly update and simplify old website codebases.
- Build times drop from minutes to seconds with Vite, making development much faster and more enjoyable.
- Page load speeds and SEO improve thanks to Vite’s optimized workflows.
- Code maintenance is easier with standard tools, meaning less time fixing and more time creating.
- The upgrade makes the blog future-proof, ready to handle new features and long-term growth.
Three years is a long time. My personal blog’s custom-built system, which I’d put together years ago, was definitely starting to feel its age. It was slow, a bit complicated to work with, and just wasn’t keeping up. It was time for a change, and I found some great tools to help:
The Old Way (A Bit of a Hand-Built Headache)
My blog’s original setup relied on a bunch of custom scripts I’d written myself. While it worked at the time, it had developed some pain points - typical of an do-it-yourself build process:
- Slow: Even small changes meant waiting a few minutes for everything to rebuild. That really added up over time.
- Tricky: Figuring out issues in the build pipeline often meant digging deep into my own complex scripts, which was never fun.
- Fragile: A simple update to one of the underlying tools could, and often did, break the whole build.
- Optimisation: My pages weren’t loading as quickly as they could, and my website performance and scores (e.g. Lighthouse) weren’t great.
The New Way (Making Things Easier with Modern Tooling)
This is where Jules, Google’s powerful code transformation tool, made a big difference. It’s incredibly good at automatically updating and cleaning up code. Jules helped me out by handling a lot of the initial work, taking my old custom setup and making it more standard and organized, which is exactly what Vite likes. It saved me a ton of manual effort in the migration of old articles to the new framework.
Once Jules had done its part, bringing in Vite felt like a huge leap forward. It completely changed how I build and deploy my blog, moving to a truly modern web workflow.
The Best Parts of the Upgrade:
- Super Fast Build Times: What used to take minutes now happens in seconds. Vite uses smart tech like native ES modules and Hot Module Replacement (HMR), meaning my development server starts instantly, and changes show up on my screen almost as soon as I type them. This dramatically improves the UX when drafting and writing.
- Quicker Page Loads: Vite builds my site in a really optimized way, focusing on performance optimization. This means my blog pages load much faster for visitors, and its SEO performance and Core Web Vitals improved significantly.
- Simpler Codebase: I got to remove a lot of my old, custom build scripts. Vite handles all the complicated stuff, so I can spend my time writing new posts and building cool features, not fixing build system configuration. This led to a much cleaner architecture.
- Easier to Maintain: Switching to a well-known and actively updated tool like Vite makes everything more reliable. I don’t have to worry about my custom setup breaking down anymore, enhancing and easing maintainability.
- A Better Development Experience: Vite is just plain easy to work with. It’s simple to set up, has great developer tools, and a helpful and expansive community. It makes coding that much more enjoyable.
My Blog Feels Brand New (and Future-Proof)
Giving an old codebase a modern stack makeover can seem like a big job. But with the smart help from Jules for initial transformations and the speed and simplicity of Vite, the whole process was manageable and very rewarding. My blog is now faster, much easier to work on, and generally just better all around, ready for the future.
Summary
If your own website’s legacy build system is starting to feel a bit behind the times, I’d definitely recommend looking into modern build tools like Vite. The improvements in how quickly you can develop, how fast your site loads, and how much simpler your code becomes are well worth the effort for any developer or blogger.
