Back in 2012 I made a keto calculator because I wanted exact macro numbers for my own diet, and all the advice online was too vague. I posted it on /r/keto, people liked it, Google ranked it well, and for years it quietly earned quite a bit of ad money while I worked on other things. It’s a single static HTML page. No backend, no build step, no database. A site like that should basically run forever.

This June I had a close look at the page for the first time in years. It turns out that every single visitor got to stare at a blank white screen for 4 seconds before the page appeared.

It had been doing that since September 2023.

The Slow Decline

I thought I knew why the revenue kept going down: from “quite a bit” at the peak to about €60 a month now. The keto hype peaked around 2019, Google’s updates buried small single-page tools, and nowadays AI answer boxes intercept most informational searches. All of that is true.

But the site was also busy sabotaging itself, and had been for years. The HTML was perfectly fine — it was all the third-party <script> tags around it that had died, one after another, without me noticing anything.

What Was Actually Broken

Quite a lot. Here is everything I found:

1. The blank page

Years ago I ran A/B tests with Google Optimize. Optimize ships with an “anti-flicker” snippet so visitors don’t see the original page before the experiment variant swaps in:

<style>.async-hide { opacity: 0 !important}</style>
<script>(function(a,s,y,n,c,h,i,d,e){s.className+=' '+y;h.start=1*new Date;
h.end=i=function(){s.className=s.className.replace(RegExp(' ?'+y),'')};
(a[n]=a[n]||[]).hide=h;setTimeout(function(){i();h.end=null},c);h.timeout=c;
})(window,document.documentElement,'async-hide','dataLayer',4000,
{'GTM-XXXXXXX':true});</script>

Read it carefully: it sets the whole <html> element to opacity: 0 and waits for the Optimize container to load and call the reveal function. If that never happens, a safety timeout shows the page after 4000 milliseconds.

Google shut down Optimize on September 30, 2023. The container script was gone, so the reveal callback never fired again. From that day on every visitor saw a blank page for the full 4 seconds, then the timeout kicked in and the page faded up as if nothing had happened.

My engagement rate over the last 12 months was 17%. Only one visitor in six stuck around. I always read that as “keto is over”. A good part of it was five lines of JavaScript waiting for a callback from a product that no longer exists.

The nasty part is that nothing actually failed. Nothing threw, nothing was logged, and the page worked perfectly — eventually. If the snippet had thrown an error the page would have stayed visible and I’d have lost nothing. Because it “worked”, I lost three years of first impressions.

2. The analytics was dead too

Why didn’t I see this in analytics? Because the analytics died first. The page still had a Universal Analytics tag, and Google stopped processing UA hits on July 1, 2023 — two months before Optimize died. The one instrument that could have shown me the cliff went dark right before the cliff.

3. A JavaScript error on every click

Hundreds of links on the page had onclick="return gatrack(this);" for click tracking. At some point the definition of gatrack got commented out — but all the call sites stayed. So every tracked click threw an uncaught ReferenceError, for years. Browsers shrug that off and the links still navigate, so no user ever noticed. Neither did I.

4. Requests to a service that no longer exists

The page still loaded Bootstrap and jQuery through jsDelivr’s /g/ combine endpoint, an API that was retired years ago. Two script requests on every page load, going to a dead URL.

5. Mobile users couldn’t zoom

The viewport meta tag said user-scalable=no, on a fixed ~870 pixel layout. About 65% of my visitors are on phones — the top three screen sizes in my analytics are all iPhones — and they got a desktop page they couldn’t even pinch-zoom.

None of these things broke the site. That’s exactly the problem. A static page doesn’t rot, but its <script> tags do — and they rot silently, because every one of them is designed to degrade gracefully instead of failing loudly.

Then I Immediately Made a Fresh Mistake

While modernizing the page this June I added Google Consent Mode, the GDPR mechanism that tells Google’s tags what a visitor has consented to. I set the defaults exactly like every tutorial shows:

gtag('consent', 'default', {
  'ad_storage': 'denied',
  'ad_user_data': 'denied',
  'ad_personalization': 'denied',
  ...
});

Deny everything, let the cookie banner grant later. Sounds safe, right?

Within days my page RPM collapsed from about €8–9 to €1.60. The problem: that default applies globally. An American visitor never gets a consent banner, so there is nothing for them to click “accept” on — they are stuck with non-personalized ads forever. I had quietly opted my entire non-EU majority out of personalized ads. The fix is a region-scoped default: granted worldwide, denied only where the law actually requires prior consent.

I only caught this because, for the first time in years, I was actually looking at the dashboards. Which is really the whole lesson of this post in one week: the old mistakes survived for three years because nobody was looking, the new mistake survived for three days because someone was.

The Site Now

It’s still a single static HTML file, and after the cleanup it’s faster than it ever was: all Core Web Vitals green, total blocking time in lab tests down from 490ms to zero, and the calculator JavaScript no longer render-blocking. The dead scripts are gone, analytics works again, consent is region-scoped, and there is now a German version and an embeddable version if you run a site in this space and want the calculator without the page around it. I did the digging and the rebuild together with an AI coding agent (Claude), which turned out to be very good at reading through 12 years of accumulated HTML without complaining.

What I Learned

A static site is not zero maintenance. My HTML from 2012 renders fine. But every third-party <script> I ever added is a subscription to someone else’s product decisions, and three of those products were discontinued under me.
Third-party scripts fail open. The anti-flicker snippet is the worst case: its failure mode was hiding my entire site, silently, with a timeout that made it look like slowness instead of breakage. Check what happens to your page when each external script never answers.
Dead instruments are worse than no instruments. A missing analytics tag is a known unknown. A dead one is a dashboard you trust and never read.
Look at it once a year. None of this needed weekly maintenance. One afternoon per year — open the page with DevTools, look at the console, look at the network tab, look at the money — would have caught every single item on the list above.

Is a €60-a-month website worth all this effort? If I price my hours honestly, probably not. But it was never really about the €60. It’s the oldest thing I’ve built that strangers still use every day, and it deserves better than spending three years hidden behind an opacity: 0, waiting for a callback that will never come.

My Website Was Blank for 4 Seconds on Every Visit

For three years, and I didn't notice a thing