A slow site does not just annoy visitors — it quietly removes them before they ever see your offer. Here is how we budget for speed.
Speed is not a technical vanity metric. It is the first filter every visitor applies to your business, and they apply it before reading a single word of your copy.
When a page takes more than three seconds to become useful on a mid-range Android phone over 4G, a large share of visitors leave. They do not complain, they do not email you, and they do not appear in any report you regularly read. The lead simply never exists.
That is why every PK Web Studio build starts with a performance budget rather than a design mockup. We decide, up front, how heavy the page is allowed to be: the size of the hero image, how many fonts load, whether an animation library is justified, and how much JavaScript ships to the browser.
The practical rules are unglamorous. Serve images in modern formats at the size they are actually displayed. Load at most two font families and subset them. Prefer CSS animation over a JavaScript animation runtime. Defer anything that is not needed for the first screen. Measure on a throttled connection, not on your office fibre.
The result is a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds and a Lighthouse performance score above 90 on delivered pages. Those numbers are not trophies — they are the reason your enquiry form gets seen at all.