We ran a speed audit on a site and found a 2.3 MB PNG sitting in the hero. It was a photograph saved in the wrong format, and on its own it accounted for 88% of the page weight. On a simulated 4G phone the largest contentful paint landed at 14.6 seconds.
The fix was not a rewrite.
What we changed
- Re-encoded the artwork as AVIF and WebP with a JPEG fallback, offered through image-set() so every browser gets a format it can decode.
- Resized the wordmark. It was a 900 by 120 pixel image rendered 16 pixels tall, so we cut it down and reduced it to a palette: 90 KB became 2.6 KB.
- Preloaded the hero, so the browser no longer waits for the stylesheet to discover it.
- Compiled Brotli for nginx as a dynamic module and ran it beside gzip, since the upstream packages ship none.
- Had the blog service rewrite sitemap.xml on every publish and withdrawal, so crawlers and readers never see two different versions of the site.
What it did
The chart at the top of this page is the measurement. The same tools and the same test conditions, before and after:
- Lighthouse mobile went from 74 to 98, desktop from 83 to 99.
- Mobile LCP fell from 14.6 seconds to 1.9.
- Page weight dropped from 2,627 KiB to 175 KiB.
No new hardware, no CDN, no framework.
Why it is worth doing
Web performance is one of the services we offer at Team Red, next to cloud, security and DevOps, and it tends to pay for itself in bounce rate and search ranking long before it shows up anywhere else. If your site feels slow and you want to know why, send us the URL.