The home page was loading 54 images before its own stylesheet

Our landing page told your browser to fetch fifty-four mentor photos before it fetched the stylesheet. It now asks for one, and the page paints sooner — especially on a phone.

The home page hero shows a scatter of mentor photos. To get them appearing smoothly we had asked the browser to preload every one of them, and at some point "every one" had become fifty-four.

A preload is a way of telling the browser "fetch this first, it is urgent." Fifty-four of them at the top of the page meant fifty-four photos were all urgent, and they were queued ahead of the stylesheet the page needs before it can draw anything at all. On a fast laptop you would never notice. On a phone on mobile data, you waited.

The page now preloads exactly one image — the largest one, the one you actually see first — and lets the rest load normally as they come into view. The served page went from fifty-four preload requests down to one.

We had assumed for a while that the home page felt slow because one of the images was too heavy. It was not. It was the queue.

← All updates