Technology
The Quiet Art of Building Fast Websites
By Bhavin Mandani·July 10, 2026·1 min read
Most slow websites aren't slow because of one dramatic mistake. They're slow because of a hundred small ones, each defensible in isolation.
Start with what the user sees
The first paint is a promise. Everything the browser does before that moment is the user staring at a blank screen, deciding whether to leave.
- Ship the smallest possible critical CSS inline
- Defer anything that isn't visible above the fold
- Treat every third-party script as a liability until proven otherwise
The cost of convenience
Every convenient abstraction has a weight. A component library that ships 300kb to render a button is not free, no matter how nice the developer experience feels.
The fastest code is the code that never runs. The second fastest is the code that runs once and gets out of the way.
Measure what matters
Core Web Vitals aren't a Google tax. They're a decent proxy for whether your site respects the person using it. LCP, CLS, and INP tell a story about the experience — listen to it.
The craft is in the discipline, not the cleverness.
Ad placement — enable AdSense in lib/config.ts