March 12, 2026
By Marcus Feldt
6 min read
Why your homepage should load in under one second
Performance is the first thing a visitor experiences about your brand — long before they read a word of your copy.
There is a number most redesign briefs never mention, and it decides more than the colour palette ever will: how long someone waits before your site says anything at all.
The first second is the whole first impression
A visitor forms a judgement about a site before they have read a word of it. If the page is blank at one second, that judgement is already forming, and it is not generous. Every additional second measurably increases the share of people who leave — and the people who leave first are usually the ones on the worst connections, which is to say, the ones you were least likely to reach anyway.
Weight is a design decision, not a build problem
Performance is usually treated as something developers fix at the end. By then the decisions that cost the most have already been made: the full-bleed hero video, the four custom font weights, the carousel nobody scrolls. A performance budget agreed at the wireframe stage is worth more than a month of optimisation after.
You cannot optimise your way out of a design that was never weighed.
On our own projects the budget is simple and boring: under 250KB of JavaScript, two font weights, images sized for the container they sit in, and nothing above the fold that waits on a third party. It is not glamorous. It is the reason our pages render before the visitor has decided to leave.
What to measure, and what to ignore
Three numbers matter for most sites: how long until something meaningful is painted, how long until the page responds to a tap, and how much the layout moves while loading. Everything else is interesting to engineers and invisible to customers. Measure the three on a mid-range phone on a mobile connection — not on the laptop you built it on.
The good news is that speed is one of the few improvements that never stops paying. It helps search ranking, it helps conversion, and it helps the people on the oldest devices most of all. There are not many design decisions you can say that about.