Reference: 2026 performance budget — SMB marketing site (Candid default targets)

reference·Scope: business·Status: current

Created 2026-05-22

For a typical SMB marketing site (5-25 pages, contact-form lead-gen, light blog) targeting CrUX p75 "Good" on mid-range Android over 4G:

Budget Category	Target	Rationale
Total uncompressed page weight (HTML+CSS+JS+initial images)	≤ 1.0 MB	Median mobile page is 2.56 MB (Web Almanac 2025: median mobile page weight crossed 2,559 KB in July 2025 (+7.8% YoY)); cutting in half is the moat
JavaScript (compressed, initial bundle)	≤ 150 KB	Per-script 100 KB ceiling (Chrome Aurora)
JavaScript (uncompressed, total)	≤ 500 KB	Forces island/partial-hydration decisions
CSS (compressed)	≤ 50 KB	Critical CSS inlined
Above-the-fold images (combined, AVIF/WebP)	≤ 250 KB	Hero ≤ 150 KB
Web fonts (total)	≤ 100 KB; ≤ 2 weights	Variable fonts where possible; Latin subset
Third-party requests	≤ 5	GTM + GA + 1 chat/pixel; nothing else without ROI math
Third-party bytes (combined)	≤ 150 KB compressed	Includes GTM fired tags
Total HTTP requests	≤ 35 on first load	Under HTTP/2 / HTTP/3 multiplexing
TTFB (p75)	≤ 200 ms	Requires edge/CDN/static-first hosting
LCP (p75 field)	≤ 2.0 s	Internal target 20% under Google's 2.5s
INP (p75 field)	≤ 150 ms	25% under Google's 200ms
CLS (p75 field)	≤ 0.05	Half of Google's 0.10

Governance: Budget enforced in CI via Lighthouse CI or DebugBear GitHub integration. Build fails if any budget exceeds threshold. Quarterly third-party-script audit. One-script-in, one-out rule. See RULE: Performance budgets enforced in CI. Build fails on budget violation. Documented budgets without CI enforcement do not work..