Byte budget · Architecture Practice Sites
Web hosting for architects — Your portfolio passes on your desk and fails at the 75th percentile
Practices measure their site on a fast Mac on office fibre, which is the one visitor profile that never appears in the report they are being graded on.
The short answer
Set a byte budget for the project-page template and measure it on a throttled mobile profile, because that is the visitor the field report is grading. Lab tools tell you whether a mechanism changed; field data tells you whether visitors felt it, and the published thresholds are read at the 75th percentile of real visits — LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. Three quarters of your visitors must be inside those, which is why a site can look excellent in the studio and fail in the report.
Architecture sites fail this specific way more than most, because the work is visual and the practice's own hardware is fast. HostingFast provides NVMe storage behind a server-level LiteSpeed cache with automatic WebP conversion, from a couple of dollars a month, with free SSL, free migration and a human on support at any hour.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
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The pattern is consistent enough to predict. A practice publishes a beautiful project page, checks it on a studio machine on office fibre, and sees a fast, sharp, satisfying result. Months later the field report says the page fails, and nobody can reproduce the failure — because the failure lives on a mid-range phone on mobile data, which is where a private client is looking at your work in the evening.
The resolution is not to distrust the lab, but to use it correctly. A lab run with the network and CPU throttled is a reasonable predictor of the field. A lab run on your own machine, unthrottled, predicts nothing at all.
From there the work is a budget rather than an optimisation: decide what a project page is allowed to weigh, measure against it, and defend it when the next set of photography arrives.
Write the budget as two numbers
Load your busiest project page throttled to a slow mobile profile, note the total transfer on a cold load, and identify the largest contentful paint element. Then choose a maximum total transfer that keeps LCP at or under 2.5 seconds on that connection. Two numbers, written down: a byte ceiling and the metric it is protecting.
A ceiling a page can be held against is worth more than an instinct nobody can test, and it has an organisational benefit too. When a project arrives with forty images, the conversation is about which twelve fit the budget rather than about whether the site feels slow — a question nobody can settle by discussion.
Why the lab and the field disagree
The lab measures one load under conditions you chose. The field aggregates real loads across weeks of real devices and networks, and grades at the 75th percentile — so the slowest quarter of your visitors decides whether you pass. A studio iMac on fibre is somewhere near the first percentile of that distribution, which is why it never predicts the outcome.
Throttle deliberately, then. Chrome DevTools will simulate a slow mobile network and a slower CPU at the same time, and the CPU part matters as much as the network on image-heavy pages: decoding several large photographs is real work on a phone. Run three, keep the median, and treat anything you cannot reproduce twice as noise.
Drawings, zoom and the honest compromise
Plans and sections are the one genuinely awkward case, because they need to stay legible under magnification and that means real pixels. Do not solve it by serving the full-resolution file inline. Show a sized, WebP-converted version on the page and load the large file only when somebody actively chooses to zoom — that way the visitor who wants detail gets it and the twenty who scrolled past do not pay for it.
Automatic WebP conversion and responsive sizes are handled by the platform, so the remaining decisions are yours: what dimension you upload at, which single image loads eagerly, and whether the zoom view is a separate request. Those three choices account for nearly all of the difference between portfolio sites that pass and portfolio sites that do not.
What a portfolio should not blame on hosting
Separate the floor from the ceiling before spending anything. `curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{time_starttransfer}' https://yourdomain.example`, five runs, median kept: against Google's 800 ms good boundary, a cached page off LiteSpeed and NVMe from a UK connection to our London origin should sit a long way inside it. If it does, hosting is not what is failing.
A portfolio that clears the field thresholds and still loses commissions has a content problem rather than a speed problem — private clients choose on process as much as on photographs, and the practices that explain planning, timescales and fees plainly win work from practices with better images. That is worth knowing before you spend a weekend on optimisation.
The platform side of an image-heavy site
Automatic WebP conversion, responsive image sizes, NVMe storage on every tier and LiteSpeed caching inside the web server. Those are the parts of a portfolio's performance we are accountable for.
Upload dimensions, how many images a page carries and which one loads eagerly are yours. Staging copies and SSH with Git and Composer are there so you can change them and measure the result.
- WebP conversion performed for you at upload time
- Smaller variants produced for you at each breakpoint
- NVMe disks beneath all plans, not only the biggest
- Caching built into the LiteSpeed web server itself
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
A budget instead of an argument
Two written numbers — byte ceiling and LCP target — turn every future image decision into arithmetic rather than a matter of taste.
Throttled testing on a clone
Staging lets you load a new project page at slow-mobile speed repeatedly, before a prospective client is the one doing the testing.
Tooling you do not have to build
WebP conversion and responsive sizes are generated for you, so your decisions are about dimensions and priority rather than about tooling.
A first byte that is not the suspect
Cached responses off LiteSpeed and NVMe measure well inside Google's 800 ms boundary, which lets you rule hosting out with one command.
A safety net for a bulk re-process
Daily backups recover files, a database or both from the panel — worth having before you re-process an entire image library.
A price that stays put
Renewals bill at the rate you ordered at, so the plan you chose against measurements is the plan you keep paying for.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Throttle before you measure
Slow mobile network and reduced CPU in DevTools. An unthrottled run on a studio machine predicts nothing about the field report you are graded on.
- 2
Write the budget down
Total transfer ceiling plus the LCP target it protects. Put it where whoever adds the next project will see it before uploading forty images.
- 3
Handle drawings as a second request
Sized version inline, full-resolution file on demand. The visitor who zooms gets detail; nobody else pays for it on the initial load.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- Project page measured on a throttled slow-mobile profile, CPU included
- Total transfer ceiling and LCP target written down as a budget
- LCP element identified rather than assumed
- Exactly one eager image per project page; the rest lazy
- Full-resolution drawings loaded on demand, not inline
- Automatic WebP conversion and responsive sizes left doing their work
- Three runs taken with the median kept, not a single best result
- Median TTFB checked with curl so hosting can be ruled in or out
- Field report read at the 75th percentile, not from a studio machine
- Daily backups restored once before any bulk image re-processing
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
Our site scores 95 in the lab and fails in the field. How?
Because the lab run was almost certainly unthrottled on a fast machine, and the field report grades the 75th percentile of real visits — mostly phones on mobile data. Your studio hardware sits at the very fast end of that distribution and therefore predicts nothing. Re-run the audit with the network and CPU throttled and the two numbers will start agreeing with each other.
How do I keep plans legible without serving huge files?
Split the two jobs. Show a sized, WebP-converted version inline for everyone, and load the full-resolution file only when a visitor actively opens a zoom view. The person studying a section gets the pixels they need; the twenty who scrolled past the page do not pay for them. That single split usually resolves the whole drawings problem.
How many images should a project page carry?
As many as fit the byte budget you wrote, which is a different and more useful question. Set the ceiling from a throttled measurement, then choose images against it. Practices that do this end up with tighter, better-edited project pages as a side effect, because the constraint forces a decision that would otherwise be avoided.
Does the CPU throttling setting really matter for a photo page?
Yes, more than people expect. Decoding several large photographs is genuine work, and a mid-range phone does it far more slowly than a workstation. On image-heavy pages the CPU multiplier often changes the result more than the network profile does, which is why leaving it at default is one of the commonest reasons a lab run flatters a portfolio.
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Automatic WebP conversion and responsive sizes, NVMe on every tier, LiteSpeed in the server, and staging to measure a project page before it ships.
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