PageSpeed 35 to 90: What I Got Wrong, Then Right

How I Took My PageSpeed Score from 35 to 90 (And What I Got Wrong First) Have you ever shipped a feature you were really proud of, only to watch your PageSpeed score sit at a painful 35 ? That was me. My app worked fine locally. But once deployed, Lighthouse painted the screen red. Users noticed too: "Why is this so slow?" This is the story of how I diagnosed the problem, wasted time on the wrong fix, and eventually pushed the score past 90 . If you've ever stared at a bad Lighthouse report and didn't know where to start, this one's for you. What Was Actually Wrong Before jumping into fixes, I needed to understand what was happening. I opened Chrome DevTools, ran Lighthouse, and found three clear issues: Issue What I Found Huge JS bundle main.js was over 2MB Render-blocking resources Components loaded upfront even when users didn't need them yet Unoptimized images PNG/JPEG files, some over 1MB each Tip for fellow devs: Before optimizing anything, always run Lighthouse first. It tells y