The Ledger

Every studio says it builds fast sites. Almost none publish a number you can check, and the ones that do publish their best run.

This is our record. Five sites — ours and four award-winning studios — measured on one machine, in one session, with one configuration. Four consecutive runs each. The worst of the four is the number printed. No run discarded, no site given an easier profile than any other, including us.

We are not top of our own table

Our site returns 93 on performance on this profile, and one of the studios above beats it. Largest Contentful Paint is 2.79 seconds against their 1.06. That is the honest reading and we are not going to bury it three scrolls down.

Two things are true at once. The 95+ guarantee applies to work we deliver, and it holds — every build ships against Lighthouse 95+, WCAG 2.2 AA and zero accessibility violations, measured on the live URL before handover. And our own site, on a four-times-throttled mobile CPU, is at 93. The gap is LCP, it is ours, and it is being fixed.

Re-measured and republished here on 15 September 2026, whatever it says.

The first attempt to fix it failed

Hours after this page went up we tried to close the gap. The homepage was preloading seven WOFF2 font files. Only three are used above the fold. The other four are roughly 143 KB competing for a throttled connection during the exact window that decides Largest Contentful Paint. Removing them from the preload list is a textbook LCP fix — the fonts still load, just without jumping the queue.

It shipped. Then it was measured, the same way as everything else on this page: four consecutive runs, worst published, no run discarded.

One run hit 100 and it would have been very easy to publish that number. Under this page’s own rule the figure is the worst of the four, and the worst of the four got worse. Steady-state LCP did not move at all. The commit that made the change said, before the result was known, that it would be reverted rather than explained if the number did not move. It was reverted the same hour. The site is back to seven preloads and back to 93.

The diagnosis was wrong, and the measurement says where the real cost is: of the 2.79 seconds, 147 ms is server response and 1,171 ms is element render delay — time spent after the bytes have arrived. Fonts were never the bottleneck. That is the next thing to attack, and it will be measured this way before it is kept.

This section exists because the failure is the point. Anyone can publish a table of wins. A ledger that never records a reversal is a marketing page wearing a lab coat.

Check any row yourself

Nothing here needs to be taken on trust. Every figure comes from a tool Google ships free:

npx lighthouse https://saffrondesigns.io/ --view

Or open Chrome DevTools on any site above, choose the Lighthouse panel, select Mobile, and press Analyze. Run it four times the way we did and take the worst.

Your numbers will not match ours exactly, and that is the point. Network conditions, hardware and the sites themselves all change — two of the figures in our own older comparison file were a month out of date and materially wrong by the time we re-ran them. A performance claim without a date and a method is not a claim. That is why this page carries both, and why the raw run data is published beside it rather than summarised.

What this page does not claim

It does not say we design better than the studios listed. Several of them make work we genuinely admire, and Lighthouse has nothing to say about taste, craft or art direction. It measures how a page is built and delivered — whether it loads, whether it shifts under your thumb, whether it works on a mid-range phone on a bad connection.

That is the entire argument. An award tells you how something looks. It says nothing about whether it works, and until now nobody was publishing the second number next to the first.

The rule

Every row on this page was measured the same way on the same day, and the worst run is the one shown. When we ship new work, it gets a row. When we re-measure, the old figures stay in the file with their dates on them.

A ledger only means something if you cannot edit the past. That is why this one is dated, published as data, and includes the row we would rather not show you.