Case study
The Slick List
Research-led buying advice for the US and Canada, built to stay quick as the archive grows.
What it had to do
A directory and recommendation site across nine categories, from fashion to finance. Directories get slower every time something is added, and this one had to be readable on a weak connection from the first day and the thousandth entry.
What we decided
The failure mode for a listings site is predictable. It launches light, it grows, and two years later every page carries a library of scripts nobody remembers adding. The decision here was to treat page weight as a constraint rather than an outcome.
The editorial position mattered as much. This is advice, not affiliate filler, so the site had to look like something that reads spec sheets rather than something that scrapes them. Shortlists are the format that does that, and they are also what people actually search for.
A weekly email sits alongside the site, which is the part of a publication somebody can own rather than rent from a search engine.
What is on the site
Nine categories, one structure
Fashion, lifestyle, living, travel, technology, arts, pets and finance, all sharing a layout so the archive scales without redesign.
Shortlists rather than listicles
The format matches how people search: a small number of considered picks, not fifty ranked by nothing.
A weekly email
Prominently placed, because a list of readers is the only audience a publisher actually owns.
The lightest site we have measured
Well under a tenth of a megabyte on the wire, which is what keeps it usable on a poor connection.
How it performs
- 360 msto paint the main content, on an emulated mid-range phone
- 192 msto first byte
- 527 KBtransferred, across 15 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 3.9× quicker than the local median.
Re-measured rather than remembered, which is why the date is on it.
Where it stands in search
Indexed across its sections and picking up listings searches, but early. A directory earns its position as the archive grows, and this one is still growing.
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 What we do not publish is the client's own traffic: those numbers are theirs, not ours to hand around.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
Page weight on a growing site is a decision made once, at the start. Everything after that is either honouring it or undoing it.