Fieldnote
A research tool whose marketing site took nine seconds to load on a phone. We rebuilt it in Astro with a CMS the team actually uses; it now loads in under one.
0.9 sto load on a mid-range phone (was 9.1 s)
- Client
- Fieldnote, research repository
- Year
- 2025
- What we did
- Marketing site, Engineering, CMS setup
The problem
Fieldnote’s site was built on a page builder that shipped 3 MB of JavaScript to show some text and a video. On a mid-range phone the first screen took nine seconds, and the team was afraid to touch it.
What we did
- Rebuilt every page in Astro: HTML first, a few kilobytes of JavaScript where a page needs it.
- Moved the content to a headless CMS with fields that match how the team writes, so the marketing lead publishes without asking an engineer.
- Replaced the autoplay video with a poster and a play button.
The result
The home page now loads in 0.9 s on the same phone and scores 100 on Lighthouse. Demo requests from mobile went up by a third in the first month.