A marketplace that felt slow, and the seven megabytes of images that made it so
Web Performance
The challenge
A live buy-and-sell marketplace — a Next.js front end, a Laravel API and admin, a Flutter mobile app — was losing visitors to loading time. The assumption in the room was that the servers needed rebuilding, which is an expensive assumption to act on and an easy one to reach.
What we built
We audited the production site from the outside, using no source code and no server access, and measured rather than inferred. Server response times came back between 0.24 and 0.58 seconds and the API between 0.16 and 0.26 — healthy figures that need no re-architecture. The latency was almost entirely image delivery: roughly 7.0 MB across 23 files on the homepage alone, original camera files served straight into product cards around 250 pixels wide.
The result
The finding reversed the plan. Correcting the image pipeline is expected to cut homepage weight by about 94 per cent, from 7.0 MB to under 500 KB, with no redesign, no replatform and no disruption to the live service. The servers, which were about to be rebuilt, are not the problem and are not being touched.