Fast, search-friendly website for a tech ecosystem organisation
A tech ecosystem organisation presenting itself to investors and startups needed a website that matched the credibility it was asking for. Its existing site was two years out of date.
- My role
- Frontend developer
- Team
- 4 - UI/UX designer, product manager, marketer, engineer
- Timeline
- 2 weeks to production
- Constraint
- Late decisions on architecture, design and hosting shortened the build window
The problem
The site existed to build credibility and be found. The original design called for rich animations and heavy media that looked impressive in a design file, but the site needed to rank on Google and load quickly on mid-range mobile networks. A site that doesn't get indexed or takes five seconds to load defeats the purpose.
The tradeoff I made
I pushed back on the heavy animations and large hero media and replaced them with lightweight transitions and optimised assets. The visual impact took a small hit, but load time and search visibility were the real goals. A site that ranks and loads beats a site that only impresses in a demo.
Visibility and trust over visual flair.
Outcomes
Lighthouse performance score, reached by cutting heavy animations and optimising assets
First Contentful Paint on mobile, within the Core Web Vitals threshold
Delivered on schedule despite a shortened build window
What I would do differently
I would push for Next.js from the start. Search visibility was the whole point of the project, and plain React doesn't render on the server out of the box, so we patched around it with extra packages. Next.js would have given us server rendering, better SEO tools and image optimisation without workarounds.