The Page That Loaded Before the App

What this note is about

For a while the site could show the wrong-looking top before the converter appeared. That was my fault, not just a hosting problem.

The first thing people saw was wrong

While testing the live site, I noticed it could show a strange block of fallback content before the normal converter loaded. It made the site feel slower and less trustworthy than it should.

It was tempting to call it a hosting problem, but the page itself was doing too much. The PDF code was loading too early, and the fallback content was too visible.

The fix was mostly removing things

I delayed the heavier PDF parsing code until someone actually needs it. I also removed a remote font request from the critical path and made the server-rendered content less likely to flash in front of the app.

The page still is not magic, but it now behaves more like the simple tool it is meant to be.