Beautiful and fast are not opposites. A budget agreed on day one keeps both on the table until launch.
Agree on numbers early
Before the first wireframe we agree on three numbers: page weight, time to first paint and the slowest device we support. Everyone can see them, and everyone owns them.
Spend where it shows
Images and fonts take most of the budget. We serve modern formats, subset fonts and load motion code only when a section needs it.
A site that loads in one second gets read. A site that loads in five gets judged.
Measure every release
Budgets only work if someone checks. Each deploy runs a performance test and flags anything that goes over.
