Performance is a Design Decision.

A hero video, three webfonts and a carousel are design decisions with a weight in kilobytes, and no amount of build tooling later will undo them. The cheapest performance win available is asking, at the wireframe stage, what each of those elements is for.

Where a heavy element earns its place, load it honestly: images sized for their container, fonts subset and preloaded, anything below the fold deferred until it is nearly in view. The point is not asceticism; it is spending the budget where the visitor benefits.

On the last five projects the pattern held every time. Sites that shipped under a megabyte on first load kept people around roughly twice as long as the ones that did not, and neither group could tell you why.