Development · Nov 10, 2025 · 7 min read
Performance First: Shipping 90+ Lighthouse on Brand Sites
A pragmatic recipe for fast, visual-heavy sites—bundling discipline, image pipelines, motion budgets, and observability.
Cee Jay
Founder, Cee Jay Studio
Core Practices
- Asset Pipeline: AVIF/WebP, responsive srcset, lazy-load below fold, preconnect critical hosts.
- CSS/JS Discipline: Purge unused CSS, code-split by route, defer non-critical JS, avoid heavy UI libs.
- Motion Budget: Cap animations to 2–3 elements; respect prefers-reduced-motion.
- Fonts: 2 weights max, swap strategy, preconnect fonts.googleapis.com.
Checks Before Launch
- Lighthouse/Pagespeed in mobile mode; Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5s.
- CLS under 0.1; avoid layout shift via fixed media dimensions.
- Use Chrome trace to spot long tasks; keep main thread idle budget healthy.
- Accessibility scan: color contrast, focus order, ARIA labels for icons.
Governance
Add a performance gate to CI. Enforce bundle budgets. Version images; block oversized assets. Treat performance as a feature, not a nice-to-have.
Need speed?
Let’s tune your brand site
We’ll audit, budget, and ship a 90+ Lighthouse plan without sacrificing aesthetics.