What to ask your agency about performance budgets

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on performance budgets, these questions are worth asking early.

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A number in writing stops slow creep. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Enforce it automatically or it gets ignored. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

How to tell if yours is fine

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. Three things worth confirming about performance budgets before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Enforce it automatically or it gets ignored — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.