The brief
Atelier Volt is a Paris-based design studio with a portfolio site that took 9 seconds to load and scored 32 on mobile PageSpeed. Their leads dried up when Google rolled out the March 2026 helpful content update. They had two weeks before a major pitch — and no budget for a full rebuild.
Week 1: triage
We froze new feature work and ran a full audit. The biggest offenders: 14MB of unoptimized portfolio images, three competing font families loaded synchronously, and a 280kb JavaScript bundle for a site with one form. We documented every issue with screenshots and projected impact before touching code.
Days 3-5: the image pipeline
We migrated all portfolio assets to AVIF + WebP with srcset, served via Cloudflare. The 14MB asset weight dropped to 1.8MB across the entire site. LCP fell from 6.1s to 2.3s with this change alone.
Days 6-9: JavaScript diet
We replaced the JavaScript-heavy scroll animations with CSS scroll-driven animations (now supported in all evergreen browsers). The bundle shrank from 280kb to 14kb. INP dropped from 340ms to 80ms.
Days 10-12: typography and fonts
We dropped two of the three font families, self-hosted the remaining one with font-display: swap, and subset it to Latin characters only. CLS went from 0.18 to 0.02. The site started looking faster even before the metrics agreed.
Days 13-14: final polish and verification
We added preconnect hints for the CDN, set proper cache headers, and ran a final RUM check. Mobile PageSpeed: 98. Desktop: 100. The pitch went well — Atelier Volt signed a 6-figure retainer the following week.