Achieving 97 Mobile and 100 Desktop Performance with Digital Lab
When it comes to building websites today, good design alone isn’t enough. If your site loads slowly, Google will penalize you in rankings—and users will abandon it before your branding or content even has a chance to shine.
At Digital Lab, a leading web design agency in Dublin, we’ve built sites that look beautiful and load lightning fast. In fact, we’ve achieved an exceptional 97 performance score on mobile and 100 on desktop using Google PageSpeed Insights—proof that it’s possible to blend aesthetics with technical excellence.
But what does that really take? What compromises, if any, does a fast site require from a design perspective?
Why Page Speed Matters
Google has made it clear: page speed is a ranking factor. On mobile especially, slower load times directly impact bounce rates, conversions, and SEO visibility. It’s not just about search engines, though—users expect seamless experiences, and anything over 2–3 seconds feels sluggish.
To build high-performing websites, certain design and development choices must be made deliberately.
Design Sacrifices You May Need to Make
- Limiting Heavy Animations and Interactions
- While parallax scrolling and animated elements can look slick, they often come with a performance cost. We help clients make smart decisions—keeping micro-interactions where they matter, and ditching the fluff.
- Optimizing Fonts and Icons
- Web fonts are often overlooked performance killers. We use streamlined font loads (e.g. variable fonts or system fonts) and icon sets that minimize render-blocking scripts.
- Minimizing High-Resolution Images
- Full-screen background images and galleries look great—but they can also drag performance. Instead, we deploy modern formats like WebP, lazy loading, and intelligent compression that preserve visual quality without hurting speed.
- Reducing Plugin Overhead
- For WordPress builds, using too many plugins can bloat your site. Our team builds custom themes with only the necessary code, avoiding unnecessary third-party dependencies.
- Choosing Speed Over Fancy Effects
- Features like video headers, chat popups, or dynamic loading elements may be appealing—but if they hurt performance, they’re carefully reconsidered. We advise clients with a performance-first mindset.
Best Practices for Blazing-Fast, Beautiful Sites
At Digital Lab, we follow proven principles to create websites that are both stunning and incredibly fast:
- Mobile-First Design
- We prioritize mobile performance from the beginning, ensuring that content is responsive and minimal on smaller devices.
- Clean Code & Lightweight Themes
- Whether you’re on WordPress or a custom CMS, we build with optimized HTML, CSS, and JS to reduce requests and increase speed.
- Core Web Vitals Optimization
- Our development process targets Google’s Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This goes beyond loading speed to ensure user-friendly performance.
- Advanced Caching and Hosting
- We use superfast cloud-based servers with advanced caching layers and CDN integration to ensure global performance consistency.
- Ongoing Audits & Speed Monitoring
- After launch, we continue to monitor page speed performance and make iterative improvements—keeping your site competitive and fast as your content grows.
Why Choose a Performance-Focused Web Design Agency?
Choosing the right web design agency in Dublin means picking a team that understands the delicate balance between speed, SEO, and design. At Digital Lab, we work with clients across industries to create websites that don’t just look impressive—they rank higher, convert better, and run faster than the competition.
Whether you’re redesigning your site or launching something new, we can help you get the results you need—without compromising your brand’s visual identity.
Want to know how fast your site could be?
Contact Digital Lab today for a performance audit or to discuss a new web project.
