My portfolio site went from 2 minutes to load to under 3 seconds

I mean, for like a year I just had this huge, beautiful hero video on my landing page. It looked cool in my head. But then I checked my analytics last month and saw a 90% bounce rate, people were leaving before it even loaded. I switched it out for a compressed, static image with the same vibe. Did it in an afternoon. The difference is insane, my contact form submissions went up the next week. Has anyone else had to kill a 'cool' feature that was just straight up broken?

3 comments

3 Comments

jessicab701mo ago

That bounce rate number is a gut punch, but honestly, it's the best teacher. I see a lot of people say they switched from video to an image, but they often skip the real fix. A 90% bounce means your server itself was probably too slow, not just the video file. A static image helps because it's smaller, but if the hosting is bad, you'll still have problems. You might want to check your Time to First Byte in a tool like WebPageTest. The real win was fixing the server delay, the image change just made that fix work.

emma_young1mo ago

Wow, that's a huge win. But honestly, the real lesson is about invisible choices. You picked a video because it felt 'premium', right? That's design thinking, not user thinking. A user just wants your page to work. We get so caught up in what looks good to us, we forget that a fast, boring page beats a broken, beautiful one every time. It's like choosing a fancy car that won't start over a regular one that gets you there.

morgan.cameron18d ago

You mentioned "invisible choices" and that really stuck with me. I've been thinking about all the other invisible choices I make every day that might be killing my site without me realizing it. Like, how do you even catch those things before they turn into a 90% bounce rate? Did you have a moment where you realized a design choice you made was actually working against you, or did you just stumble into it like I did with this video? I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to spot these problems earlier, before my analytics start screaming at me. Because right now I feel like I'm just reacting to disasters instead of preventing them.