'Make the site faster' is one of the most common briefs we get, and one of the least specific. Speed is the sum of dozens of decisions — where rendering happens, how assets are delivered, what runs before the page is interactive — and most performance problems trace back to a small number of root causes.
Rendering strategy is the foundation. Server-rendering content that doesn't change per-user, streaming what does, and avoiding unnecessary client-side data fetching waterfalls will do more for perceived speed than almost any micro-optimization layered on top.
Images are the next biggest lever for most content sites — serving modern formats, sizing them correctly for their containers, and lazy-loading anything below the fold. It's unglamorous work, but it routinely accounts for the largest chunk of page weight.
Last, audit your third-party scripts ruthlessly. Analytics tags, chat widgets, and marketing pixels accumulate over time, and each one adds parse time, network requests, and main-thread work. We run a quarterly audit with every retainer client specifically to catch this kind of drift before it compounds.
