The home page was loading 54 images before its own stylesheet

The home page hero shows a scatter of mentor photos. To get them appearing smoothly we had asked the browser to preload every one of them, and at some point "every one" had become fifty-four.

A preload is a way of telling the browser "fetch this first, it is urgent." Fifty-four of them at the top of the page meant fifty-four photos were all urgent, and they were queued ahead of the stylesheet the page needs before it can draw anything at all. On a fast laptop you would never notice. On a phone on mobile data, you waited.

The page now preloads exactly one image, the largest one, the one you actually see first. The rest load normally as they come into view. The served page went from fifty-four preload requests down to one.

We had assumed for a while that the home page felt slow because one of the images was too heavy. It was not. It was the queue.