The two-second budget: performance as a growth lever
A faster site is not a nice-to-have. It is a demand channel you already paid for.
Every hundred milliseconds of load time is a slice of conversion. On mobile, a four-second site can lose a third of its buyers before the page even settles. Speed is not a vanity metric — it is money left in the browser.
We treat performance as a budget, not an afterthought. A target LCP under two seconds is set before design starts, and every asset, font and script is weighed against it. If a feature cannot fit the budget, it does not ship until it can.
The edge makes this cheaper than it used to be. Rendering close to the user, streaming HTML, and shipping almost no JavaScript by default means fast is the default state, not a heroic optimisation at the end.
The payoff compounds: a faster site lifts every channel feeding it, so the same media spend simply converts harder.