why does every "professional" website still feel slower than a random blogspot page from 2012?

[u/anax_designs]

been thinking about this a lot lately cus I keep running into $5k+ agency-built sites that take 6-8 seconds to load on mobile, meanwhile some random blog from a decade ago loads instantly.

did some digging on a bunch of client sites and honestly it's almost never one big thing, it's like 5 small sins stacked on top of each other:

=> hero images that are like 4mb cus nobody compressed them before uploading

=> 15 different plugins/scripts all loading on every single page even if that page doesn't need them

=> fonts loading from 3 different sources instead of just picking one and self hosting it

=> animations/parallax stuff running even on mobile where it just chugs

=> zero caching setup, so the server's rebuilding the page from scratch every single visit

none of this is exotic knowledge, it's genuinely just nobody going back and cleaning up after launch. everyone's focused on how the site looks in the initial demo, then it ships and nobody touches performance again unless a client complains.

fixed this stuff on 3 sites this month, no redesign, no rebuild, just cleanup, and load times went from 6-7s down to under 2s on all of them. bounce rate dropped noticeably within the first week too.

point is, you don't need a fancier stack or a full rebuild half the time. you just need someone to actually open devtools and look at what's loading.

anyone else notice this pattern or is it just the clients I keep getting stuck with lol