Research group sites are rarely slow because of traffic. They are slow because of accumulation: a carousel plugin from 2019, three font families, a video header, and a page builder underneath it all. Core Web Vitals — Google’s measures of loading, interactivity, and visual stability — simply put numbers on the accumulation.
The order of operations
- Largest Contentful Paint: serve the hero image properly sized and self-hosted, and let the headline be text, not an image of text.
- Interaction to Next Paint: remove JavaScript before optimising it. Most lab sites can lose half their scripts with no visible change.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: give images dimensions, reserve space for embeds, and self-host fonts so text doesn’t reflow.
Subtraction beats optimisation
Every performance technique has a smaller, better sibling: not loading the thing at all. A research site needs to publish papers, people, and news legibly. Nearly everything beyond that is decoration the metrics will charge you for. Lean builds age well — which matters on sites that are, by funding design, rebuilt rarely.
A 90-minute triage for any lab site
Open PageSpeed Insights and test your homepage and one publication list. Note the three Core Web Vitals scores, then look at the diagnostics rather than the headline number. The waterfall tells you the story: what loaded, in what order, and what blocked the render.
In our experience the same four fixes recover most of the score: compress and resize the hero image (often a 4MB photo displayed at 800px), remove the slider nobody scrolls past slide one, self-host the two fonts actually used and drop the other three, and delete plugins whose job ended with the grant that funded them.
Keeping it fast
- Set a page-weight budget — one megabyte is generous — and check it whenever the site changes hands.
- Prefer text over images of text, and SVG over PNG for diagrams and logos.
- Lazy-load below-the-fold media, but never the hero.
- Re-test after every plugin install. The metric moves before users complain.
Performance on academic sites is ultimately a hospitality question. Your readers include people on field-site connections, hospital Wi-Fi, and ageing departmental machines. A fast site is the version of rigour they can feel.
