Backend & Cloud Engineering
Performance Optimization
Find the actual bottleneck, fix it, and prove the improvement.
- Typical timeline
- 1-3 weeks for audit and primary fixes
- Category
- Backend & Cloud Engineering
- Engagement
- Fixed-scope phases
- You receive
- Code, data & documentation
Overview
Performance work should be driven by measurement, not by guesswork. We profile first to find where time is genuinely being spent, fix the largest contributors, and report the before-and-after numbers. Usually two or three changes account for most of the available improvement.
It is slow, and nobody knows precisely why
Pages take several seconds to load. Reports time out. Users complain the system is slow at particular times. Without profiling, the response is usually to buy a bigger server, which treats a symptom and often does not help at all.
You will recognise this if
- Pages take more than three seconds to become usable on mobile
- Certain reports or screens time out entirely
- The system slows noticeably during peak hours
- Google PageSpeed Insights reports poor Core Web Vitals
What you get out of it
The difference this makes
Measured, not assumed
Profiling identifies the real bottleneck, which is frequently not the component everyone suspected.
Direct commercial effect
Faster pages measurably improve conversion and search ranking; faster internal screens reclaim staff time every day.
Cheaper than more hardware
Fixing a missing index or an N+1 query usually beats a larger server, and costs nothing per month afterwards.
Verified afterwards
Before-and-after figures on the metrics that matter, so you can see what the work achieved.
What we build
- Front-end audit: Core Web Vitals, bundle size, render-blocking resources, image delivery
- Back-end profiling to identify slow endpoints and functions
- Database analysis: slow query logs, execution plans, N+1 detection, index review
- Caching strategy across CDN, application and database layers
- Asset optimisation: image formats and sizing, code splitting, font loading
- Load testing to establish capacity limits and failure behaviour
- Infrastructure right-sizing based on measured usage
- A written report with findings, actions taken and measured improvement
How it gets used
An e-commerce site losing mobile conversions
Core Web Vitals work on image delivery, JavaScript size and server response, improving both conversion and search visibility.
A business application that slows at month-end
Profiling finds reporting queries competing with transactional load; a read replica and query tuning resolve it.
An API that struggles under concurrency
Connection pooling, caching and query optimisation raise throughput substantially on the same hardware.
Technology we typically use
You do not need to care about this list — but your next developer will.
- Lighthouse / WebPageTest
- PostgreSQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE
- Application profilers
- Redis
- CDN configuration
- k6 load testing
Timeline: Typically 1-3 weeks for audit and primary fixes
Questions
Performance Optimization — common questions
Something else on your mind? Ask us directly — it is usually faster than reading.
How much faster can it realistically get?
Will you need to rewrite the application?
Does page speed really affect Google ranking?
Related services
Businesses that need this often need one of these as well.
Thinking about performance optimization?
Tell us about your situation. We will tell you whether this is the right service, what it would involve, and roughly what it would cost.