Hi, I responded to your great comment over at lowtechmagazine[0]. I'm not sure if you check the thread there regularly so I'm also pinging you here

[0]: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtec...

this is typical motherfuckingwebsite.com vs bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com.

The design team of solar.lowtechmagazine.com is squarely on the side of the bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

800x800 indeed is excessive. We'll resize them to something smaller. Jquery is already on its way out. Thanks for the feedback!

Hi I'm one of the people that worked on the webdesign, back-end and hardware. You are right about the caching, one of our strategies is actually to cache very aggressively. Not only for images but even for all HTML aside from the front page and about pages. This works for us since low-tech magazine only publishes a maximum of one article a month and the site spans a decade of content which won't change anymore.

However, since we were still working on the site at the time it got massively popular, we changed the caching settings in order for people to see the changes and fixes that we were pushing.

I'll look into those server headers as well!

Cool, that makes sense. You should be able to easily turn off etags in your nginx config. This won't just save bytes in your response headers, but will stop a lot of HEAD requests to your server that are required to do validation caching.