Some Reads

How We Cut Page Load Time by 60% on a High-Traffic E-Commerce Site

A client came to us with a storefront that was functionally fine but painfully slow — 4.8s Largest Contentful Paint on mobile, and a bounce rate that reflected it. Here's what actually moved the needle, in the order we tackled it.

Image pipeline first. Product photography was being served at full upload resolution regardless of viewport. Switching to responsive `srcset` images in WebP format with lazy-loading below the fold cut transferred bytes by more than half on the category pages alone.

Render-blocking resources. Fonts and non-critical CSS were blocking first paint. We inlined critical CSS, deferred the rest, and preloaded the hero font with `font-display: swap`.

Third-party script audit. A/B testing tools, chat widgets and marketing pixels were loading synchronously on every page. We moved all of them behind `requestIdleCallback` or user-interaction triggers — nothing that isn't needed for the first interaction should compete with it.

Database and caching. Product listing queries were re-computed on every request. Adding fragment caching for category pages and a CDN in front of static assets removed the majority of server response time.

The result: LCP dropped from 4.8s to under 1.9s, and the client saw a measurable lift in both organic ranking and checkout completion within the following month. Performance work rarely gets the same attention as new features, but it compounds — every millisecond saved applies to every visitor, forever.

At avokado, we've helped brands across e-commerce, travel, SaaS and marketplaces turn ideas like this into shipped products. If you're weighing a similar decision, get in touch at /contact/ and let's talk through your roadmap.