Performance and cost
Performance work that ignores the invoice is half the job.
What this is
Fast, and cheap to keep fast.
A page can be quick and still cost more every month than it needs to. The two problems have the same cause, work being done repeatedly that could be done once, and they are usually solved by the same change, which is why we treat them as one engagement rather than two.
The largest wins are almost never micro-optimisations. They are structural: what renders on the server versus the client, what is cached and for how long, and whether images are being transformed twice by two different services that both bill for it. We have found a site paying a metered image optimiser to re-process pictures a content CDN had already resized, at a cost that dwarfed anything a code change would have saved.
For African audiences this is not a scoreboard exercise. Pages are read on mobile data, on devices several generations behind the ones sites are tested on, and a heavy homepage is a paywall nobody agreed to.
What’s involved
- Rendering and caching strategy
- What is static, what is per-request, and what is revalidated, decided rather than defaulted.
- Image and asset pipelines
- One transformation, at one place, at the sizes actually served.
- Core Web Vitals
- Measured on real devices and connections, not a lab profile on office fibre.
- Infrastructure cost review
- What the metered services are actually billing for, and which of it is duplicated work.
How it usually goes
- 01Measure
- Field data and the bill, together. Neither is meaningful alone.
- 02Find the structural cause
- Usually one or two decisions, not fifty small ones.
- 03Change and re-measure
- Against the same baseline, so the claim is checkable.
- 04Write down the budget
- So the next feature has a number to stay under.
What we won’t do
- We will not quote a Lighthouse score as an outcome. It is an instrument, not a result.
- We will not optimise a page while ignoring what it costs to serve.
Where we’ve done it
- Khendo FM
A radio station whose website is part of the transmission rather than a poster for it.
- Business Report
An independent Kenyan business publication, rebuilt as a server-rendered newsroom its editors run themselves.
Next
If this is the shape of your problem, describe the part that breaks if it isn’t right.
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