What a fast website actually costs

Most slow sites are not slow because of the framework. They are slow because of a hero image nobody compressed, four analytics scripts loaded in the head, and a font stack that blocks first paint.

On a typical build, we find 60% of the improvement in three places: image pipeline, third-party script strategy, and server response time. None of them require a rewrite.

The remaining 40% is architectural — rendering strategy, data fetching, cache headers — and that is where a framework decision genuinely matters. We choose it after we know the traffic pattern, not before.

Set a budget in milliseconds and enforce it in CI. Performance you do not measure on every deploy is performance you will lose within a quarter.