Performance is a feature. On a finance site where trust is everything, a slow first impression quietly costs conversions before a visitor reads a single word. Here’s how we took one homepage from 2.1s to 0.8s LCP.
Measure before you touch anything
We started with field data from Core Web Vitals, not lab scores. Real users on real devices tell you where the pain actually is — often mobile, on mid-tier hardware and flaky networks.
Kill the render-blocking waterfall
The biggest wins were unglamorous: self-hosting fonts, deferring non-critical JS, and inlining critical CSS. Each shaved hundreds of milliseconds off the critical path.
- Self-host and preload fonts with font-display: swap
- Defer and split JavaScript by route
- Serve responsive, modern image formats
- Cache aggressively at the edge
Images are usually the elephant
Right-sized, lazy-loaded, modern-format images removed megabytes from the page. We reserved layout space to eliminate cumulative layout shift at the same time.
The fastest request is the one you never make. Most performance work is really about deleting things.
The business result
A faster homepage lifted conversion by double digits and improved rankings. Performance isn’t a vanity metric — it’s a growth lever.