Keeping a site fast after launch

Day one is usually fine. Week three is when three analytics tags, a chat widget, and a full set of unused font weights show up. Each one seemed small in a meeting.

We keep a budget: the homepage should not download a novel before the heading paints. New third parties go through us. If a tag is required for ads, it loads after the page, not before. Images get sized for the slot they live in, not the original camera file.

The sitemap does not make a site fast. Honest pages do. Crawlers like the same thing humans like: one document, a title that matches the heading, internal links that go somewhere. That is the whole indexing plan, and it is why this site is files instead of a generator that emits thin URLs.