Validating and improving my site's performance

February 14, 2026

A few months back, Nicolas Magand wrote about giving his site the "club racer treatment" — stripping it back to focus on what actually matters. For a blog like his, the driving experience is readability above all else, but he also wanted clean W3C validation and a perfect PageSpeed Insights score. He ended up with a clear priority order:

1. Driving experience / Readability
2. Performance / W3C validation & PageSpeed Insights scores

That framing stuck with me: performance in service of the reader, not performance as an end in itself.

Around the same time, I came across James' Coffee Blog, where James announced a handy tool he built called Validate Everything. The concept is simple — paste in a URL and it generates links to a whole suite of validators. It's the kind of tool you didn't know you needed until you have it.

I decided to put this site to the test.

What I Changed

Running through the validators surfaced two areas I wanted to improve:

Inlined styles for performance. Moving styles inline made for faster page loads and a simpler deployment process.

Theme change for readability. The previous theme had some contrast that weren't doing the reading experience any favors. Readability is the whole point, I switched from the dark theme to a simple light theme.

The Results

After making those changes, the numbers came back clean:

PageSpeed Insights — 100 across the board:

• 100 Performance
• 100 Accessibility
• 100 Best Practices
• 100 SEO

Carbon rating: A+

W3C HTML Validation:

Document checking completed. No errors or warnings to show.

The scores are great. More importantly, the changes make the site better to read and a little quicker to load. That’s the part I care about.

If you haven't tried James' Validate Everything tool yet, it's worth a few minutes with your own site. You might be surprised what turns up.