Will Kahani slow my site down?

Most users do not see a noticeable impact on their site performance when Kahani is installed. This is because Kahani aims to remain as lightweight as possible and we're constantly optimizing how we can balance delivering a rich, immersive experience with minimal impact on site speed. 

How is the Kahani JS script optimized for site performance?

When a user accesses any page with Kahani installed, they won't be downloading the uncompressed version of Kahani, they will be downloading minified and compressed version of Kahani (which is roughly 180KB).  Before deploying the script online, we minify our script (this means removing anything unnecessary).  Once minified, we serve an optimized version of our script using Cloudfront (A CDN by Amazon) to serve kahani.js and this ensures a visitor only download the compressed version which is ~180KB.  If you open the network tab and open any client website with Kahani installed, you can see the size of data was download.  

Note: Google lighthouse (site speed tool) will show the uncompressed size but a user will never download this version of KahaniJS.

How will the assets be hosted and loaded? 

The assets are hosted and loaded via the kahani content delivery network to ensure minimal impact on your site speed/performance.  Story thumbnails are loaded (usually static pictures or smaller gifs, easy to load) on page load.  We don't load kahani story/chapter content until a user clicks into a bubble so that isolates potential impact on the page load itself, and then once the user is in a story we load the content from our CDN.

What can I do to reduce impact on site speed?

If you'd like to adjust your strategy to balance for a lower impact on site speed, you can create stories that DO NOT use videos.  This is one way to reduce the size of our script as Kahani can detect whether your stories contain videos and load an alternative version of our script that is stripped of video.js.