Core Web Vitals after the redesign

Redesigns are where Core Web Vitals quietly go backwards — a new hero video, an unoptimized font swap, a client-side chart library that wasn't there before. None of it looks like a performance change in the PR diff.

We run Lighthouse in CI against the same set of representative pages on every redesign PR, not just at launch. Budgets are enforced, not advisory: a regression past the threshold fails the build the same way a broken test would.

The result isn't a perfect score forever — it's that regressions get caught while they're still a one-line fix, not a quarter of lost rankings later.