For six months in 2020 we sprinted to make every site we touched buttery on slow phones in poor reception. The brief we gave ourselves was simple and slightly painful: if it doesn’t feel instant on a five-year-old Android, it isn’t done.
What we measured
Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, and Cumulative Layout Shift — Core Web Vitals — were the meaningful numbers. Pretty Lighthouse scores were not. We threw out a few in-house dashboards and started watching real-user metrics from real visitors instead.
The biggest wins were never glamorous. Removing a 380KB JS dependency that animated a hero we hadn’t shipped yet. Hand-cropping hero images instead of letting the CMS do it. Killing a font weight nobody could distinguish from the next weight up. Boring decisions, compounding into something that finally felt fast.
What we refused to cut
We didn’t strip out the heavy custom typography or the cinematic intros that make our sites feel like ours. The trick was making them lazy, asynchronous, and rendered only after the page felt usable. Speed is not the absence of craft. It’s craft that respects the user’s time.
