Performance work is usually done once, celebrated, and then quietly undone over the following year as features are added by people who were not there. The other common failure is measuring the wrong thing: a desktop audit on a fast connection is not what your customers experience on a mid-range phone on mobile data. The useful question is never 'what does the score say' but 'what is the slowest thing a real user waits for, and what is causing it'.
What the work involves
- Measurement on representative devices and networks, plus field data where it exists
- Diagnosing the actual cause, which is regularly not the one everybody assumes
- Critical rendering path work — what blocks, what defers, what could simply not ship
- Image and font strategy, usually the largest single win available
- Third-party script audit, usually the second largest, and the most political
- A performance budget enforced in the build, so the improvement survives the next six months
Why we are credible at this
We found on our own site that entrance animations, not the network, were deciding when a page looked ready — the tenth card in a list was arriving more than a second and a half after the click. There is now a guard that fails the build if an entrance animation exceeds 0.3 seconds or a per-item delay exceeds 0.15.
What moves the price
We quote after discovery and the number is fixed before anything starts. These are the things that move it, so you can see roughly where your project sits before you talk to us.
- Whether the problem is diagnosis or remediation — finding it is sometimes most of the work
- How much of the weight comes from third-party scripts you may not be able to remove
- Whether the fix requires architectural change or configuration
- Whether you want ongoing enforcement or a one-time improvement
Questions we get asked
Other Web Design work
Tell us what you are trying to do
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether we are the right people. If we are not, we will say so and point you somewhere better.