I've finally added a search functionality to my blog, after many months of deliberating over styling and performance impact. After considering various options, I implemented a lightweight client-side search that lets readers quickly find posts by typing keywords into the search box now positioned in the header. The search looks through post titles and content excerpts, highlighting matching terms and displaying up to 10 results in a dropdown. It's nothing revolutionary, but it works well — searches execute in under 10 milliseconds once the index is loaded, and the whole implementation adds just 5KB of JavaScript and CSS to the initial page load.
Search uses a lazy-loading mechanism. Rather than forcing every visitor to download the 143KB search index (containing data for all 629 posts), the index only loads when someone actually clicks or tabs into the search box. This means most visitors who come to read a specific post aren't penalized with extra download time they'll never use. When someone does focus the search input, the index loads in the background while they're typing their query — if they've already entered text by the time it loads, the search runs automatically. It's a simple optimization, but it keeps the blog fast for everyone while still providing instant search for those who need it. The entire search feature added less than half a second to my build time, which felt like a reasonable trade-off for the functionality gained.