Three Web Performance Wins Worth Doing Before Any Redesign

Most "the website needs a redesign" conversations are actually "the website needs to load faster" conversations in disguise. Try these three fixes first.

1. Optimise your images

Run your homepage through any free image audit. If your hero image is 4MB, you've found half a second of latency right there. Convert to AVIF or WebP, serve responsive sizes, lazy-load anything below the fold. A modern image pipeline costs nothing and can cut your Largest Contentful Paint by 30-50%.

2. Stop loading marketing tags you don't read

Open your tag manager. Count how many scripts are running on every page load. Now count how many of those produce a number that anyone on your team actually looks at. The difference is your cleanup list. Most sites we audit are running 8-15 scripts and using 2.

3. Cache like you mean it

Set proper cache headers on static assets. Use a CDN — Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify, any of them. Most small business sites are running on a hosting plan from 2019 with cold servers in a single region. Moving to a modern edge-cached setup is usually a 2-hour migration and a permanent speed boost.

What changes

After these three, run Lighthouse again. If your Performance score is above 90, the answer to "does this site need a redesign" might just be "no, it needed an afternoon." We've talked clients out of $30k redesigns this way more than once.