Performance budgets for small teams

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Most advice about performance budgets assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

What to keep

A number in writing stops slow creep. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

Where to start

Enforce it automatically or it gets ignored. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The short version

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.