A practical performance budget for marketing sites
The metrics we hold every build to, how we measure them in CI, and the small trade-offs that keep pages fast on real Indian mobile networks.
Performance is a design constraint
A beautiful marketing site is useless if half the visitors leave before it loads. We treat performance as a first-class requirement, not a post-launch optimisation.
Our budget is simple enough that designers and copywriters understand it, and strict enough that engineers respect it.
The numbers we target
- Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on 4G.
- Total page weight under 1.5 MB for content pages, 2.5 MB for rich landing pages.
- No more than 60 render-blocking requests on first load.
- Cumulative Layout Shift below 0.1.
- Time to Interactive under 4.5 seconds on a mid-range Android device.
Measuring in CI
We run Lighthouse in continuous integration on every pull request. If a change pushes the budget over the limit, the build fails. This sounds aggressive, but it prevents death by a thousand optimisations after launch.
We also track real-world metrics through analytics once the site is live, because lab scores do not always match what users experience on patchy networks.
Trade-offs that actually work
We prefer system fonts for body text and reserve custom fonts for headlines. Images are served in modern formats with explicit width and height attributes. Third-party scripts are loaded asynchronously and only when necessary.
Animations are GPU-friendly transforms, not layout-triggering properties. And we never autoplay background video above the fold.
AB Technologies Team
Published July 2026