Case study
bitcritiq
A technology review site where the verdict has to arrive before the reader does.
What it had to do
Publishing, at volume, across nine subject areas. The site had to stay fast as the archive grew, make the verdict findable in seconds, and survive readers arriving on a single article from a search with no idea who the publication is.
What we decided
Review traffic behaves unlike any other. Almost nobody lands on the homepage. They arrive on one article, from one search, having already decided what they want to know, and they leave the moment they have it. That makes the article page the whole product and the homepage a secondary concern.
The structural decision was to lead with the verdict and show the working underneath. A review that buries its conclusion under eight hundred words of preamble loses the reader who came for the answer, and the reader who came for the answer is most of them.
Nine subject sections give the archive somewhere to grow without the navigation collapsing, and the site stays light enough that a reader on mobile data gets the verdict before they lose patience.
What is on the site
Verdict first, evidence after
The conclusion is the opening, not the payoff. It is what the reader searched for and what an AI assistant quotes.
Nine subject sections
From artificial intelligence to gaming, so the archive can grow for years without the navigation needing a rethink.
A running news strip
Short items alongside long reviews, so the site has a reason to be visited as well as found.
Built to stay light as it grows
A publishing site gets heavier every month unless somebody decides otherwise at the start.
How it performs
- 332 msto paint the main content, on an emulated mid-range phone
- 132 msto first byte
- 133 KBtransferred, across 20 requests
Measured 2026-09-20. Median of 3 loads, emulated mid-range phone at 390px, cold cache, waiting for the load event. For context, the median across the 300 Chicago-area small business sites we tested was 1,406 ms, and Google treats anything under 2,500 ms as good. This site is about 4.2× quicker than the local median.
Re-measured rather than remembered, which is why the date is on it.
Where it stands in search
Articles surface on the first page for the hardware questions they answer, such as “512gb vram”, which is the whole point of a review site: the reader arrives on the answer, not the homepage.
Checked 20 September 2026. Go and run the search yourself — that is the point of putting it here. What we do not publish is the client's own traffic: those numbers are theirs, not ours to hand around.
Worth taking from this
For anything people search rather than browse, the article page is the product. Design the arrival, not the homepage.