spanish-academy — week of 2026-05-18

This week was a dedicated performance push, driven by real page-speed scores. A marketing site lives or dies on first impression, and the homepage was loading heavier than it needed to.

The biggest win was the homepage hero. I resized and lazy-loaded the slideshow images so the page paints its main content faster instead of waiting on oversized art. From there I routed images across the site — homepage and every page hero — through a single responsive-image helper, so the browser downloads an appropriately sized version for each device rather than one huge file for everyone. I also deferred the third-party scripts (analytics, chat, tracking pixels) so they stop blocking the initial render.

Alongside the speed work I cleared out a batch of build-time deprecation warnings and removed some dead fallback code so the project builds clean. I also wired up automated code review on pull requests, which has already started catching small issues before they land. Faster pages, a quieter build, and a bit more guardrail on every change.