Case Studies
The 42-Second Rescue: Saving a SaaS Site from Google's Core Update
BidStream's pricing page ranked #2 for "construction bidding software" (8,100 monthly searches) and drove 40% of demos. After Google's March 2023 Core Web Vitals update, rankings dropped to page 4—demo requests fell 71% in 6 weeks. Diagnostics showed catastrophic performance: LCP of 8.4s, CLS of 0.64, TBT of 3,200ms. The site was functionally dead on mobile.
Strategic Implementation
& Digital Results
We implemented a surgical performance overhaul without redesigning the site. First, migrated all third-party scripts to Partytown (web worker isolation)—analytics now ran off the main thread, eliminating 3.8s of blocking time.
Hero video: Converted to H.265 codec, compressed to 2.1MB, and added a static poster image with preload hint. For mobile viewports, we replaced the video entirely with a static WebP image (380KB).
CSS optimization: Used PurgeCSS to strip unused Tailwind classes, reducing stylesheet from 340KB → 28KB. Inlined critical above-the-fold CSS (6KB) directly in the <head> and deferred the rest.
Implemented Cloudflare Workers to serve a cached, static HTML shell for the pricing page—time to first byte dropped from 1.2s to 140ms.
Font strategy: Swapped Google Fonts for self-hosted subset WOFF2 files (only Latin character set), reducing font payload by 68%. Added font-display: swap to prevent FOIT.
Background
BidStream's pricing page ranked #2 for "construction bidding software" (8,100 monthly searches) and drove 40% of demos. After Google's March 2023 Core Web Vitals update, rankings dropped to page 4—demo requests fell 71% in 6 weeks. Diagnostics showed catastrophic performance: LCP of 8.4s, CLS of 0.64, TBT of 3,200ms. The site was functionally dead on mobile.
The Challenges
- Third-party script carnage: 14 marketing scripts (Google Analytics, HubSpot, Intercom, LinkedIn Insight) blocked main thread for 4.1 seconds
- Unoptimized hero video (42MB MP4) auto-playing above the fold on the homepage
- Render-blocking CSS: 340KB of unused Tailwind styles loaded synchronously
The Solution
We implemented a surgical performance overhaul without redesigning the site. First, migrated all third-party scripts to Partytown (web worker isolation)—analytics now ran off the main thread, eliminating 3.8s of blocking time.
Hero video: Converted to H.265 codec, compressed to 2.1MB, and added a static poster image with preload hint. For mobile viewports, we replaced the video entirely with a static WebP image (380KB).
CSS optimization: Used PurgeCSS to strip unused Tailwind classes, reducing stylesheet from 340KB → 28KB. Inlined critical above-the-fold CSS (6KB) directly in the <head> and deferred the rest.
Implemented Cloudflare Workers to serve a cached, static HTML shell for the pricing page—time to first byte dropped from 1.2s to 140ms.
Font strategy: Swapped Google Fonts for self-hosted subset WOFF2 files (only Latin character set), reducing font payload by 68%. Added font-display: swap to prevent FOIT.
The Competitive
Edge Delivered.
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