Reading your own analytics before you optimise anything
Half the performance work teams do is aimed at a device nobody in their audience owns.
Before anything else, open your analytics and answer three questions: what is the median device, what is the median connection, and which page do people actually land on.
Most teams optimise the homepage and discover later that 70% of traffic arrives on an article. That single fact reorders the whole backlog.
- Sort your landing pages by sessions and look at the top three, not the one on the design mock.
- Find the tenth percentile device, not the median. That is who is having a bad time.
- Check the split between new and returning visits before you spend a week on caching.