Users leave before they judge you
A three-second load on mobile loses a meaningful share of visitors before they've seen a single word of your copy. No amount of design quality survives a blank screen.
Most of the weight is avoidable
Unoptimised images, a date library used for one format call, three analytics scripts, and a font loaded in six weights. The fix is rarely clever. It's an audit and a few deletions.
Budget it, or it comes back
Performance regresses by default. Set a budget in CI, fail the build when it's exceeded, and the problem stops being something you fix every eighteen months.
