The SaaS Next homepage was beautiful and slow: 6.8 seconds to first meaningful paint, and a bounce rate that reflected it. The design was fine. The backend was fine. The problem was everything in between.
Fix one: images. WebP conversion, real display-size resolution, and lazy loading below the fold. This alone cut load time by roughly 40%.
Fix two: fonts. A third-party font stack was downloading nearly a megabyte before a single letter rendered. Subsetted, self-hosted, and swapped — the typography got faster and looked identical.
Fix three: JavaScript. Forty render-blocking scripts became nine deferred ones. If it wasn't critical for first paint, it waited.
Fix four: caching. Correct cache headers turned repeat visits into near-instant loads.
The result: 1.9 seconds, a third less bounce, and more conversions. No rewrite was needed — just the deletion of everything the page didn't need. Performance is not a feature. It is the absence of neglect.