Johnny UnarThe 3-second rule
Here's a number that should scare you: 53% of mobile users abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Not 10 seconds. Three. And yet most teams treat performance as something to 'optimize later' — after the features are built, after the launch, after the redesign. By then, the damage is done. Every unnecessary kilobyte of JavaScript, every unoptimized image, every render-blocking stylesheet is a tax on your conversion rate.
Set hard limits
A performance budget is a set of hard limits your team agrees to enforce. Total JavaScript bundle under 200KB gzipped. Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds. Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Time to Interactive under 3.5 seconds. These aren't aspirational goals — they're guardrails. When a new feature would push you over budget, you either optimize it or cut something else. No exceptions.
Tooling makes it practical
The tooling makes this practical. Lighthouse CI runs in your GitHub Actions pipeline and fails the build if performance scores drop below your threshold. Bundlephobia shows the cost of every npm package before you install it. Next.js has built-in bundle analysis. WebPageTest gives you filmstrip views of real-world loading on throttled connections. The data is there — most teams just don't look at it.
Start today
Start today. Measure your current Core Web Vitals. Set budgets 10–15% tighter than your current numbers. Add Lighthouse CI to your pipeline. Review bundle size in every PR. The teams that ship fast sites aren't the ones with the best developers — they're the ones that made performance a non-negotiable part of their process. At steezr, every project ships with a performance budget baked into CI. Because speed isn't a feature — it's the foundation.
