Website speed optimization for a clinic consultancy's bilingual site in Colombia

Decision 1 · Fonts and critical path

Self-hosted fonts and 67 icons instead of the full icon font: average FCP from 4.5 s to 1.8 s

Medipro cut the average first paint of its 6 control URLs from 4.5 s to 1.8 s with a change to the shared template, not to each page. Julián Franco traced the cause to the head: two Google Fonts stylesheets blocked the first paint on all 41 pages, and the Material Symbols icon font downloaded in full even though the site uses 67 icons. While it loaded, visitors saw words like "arrow_forward" instead of the icon, and then the page jumped. Phase 1 made three changes:

• Plus Jakarta Sans variable font, subset to Latin characters and served from the site: 27 KB, with a fallback font using calculated metrics so the text doesn't shift when it swaps.
• Material Symbols cut down to the 67 icons in use: 9.7 KB.
• Hero image preloaded with fetchpriority="high" on the 10 service pages. It used to be a background inside a style attribute that the browser didn't discover until the CSS finished.

URL	FCP before	FCP after
/	4.7 s	1.2 s
/servicios/	4.7 s	2.8 s
/ia-para-consultorios-medicos/	4.2 s	0.9 s
/blog/	4.2 s	1.1 s
Article on booking more appointments from the front desk	4.4 s	2.3 s
/en/services/	4.7 s	2.7 s
Average	4.5 s	1.8 s

Source: mobile Lighthouse. Before: site audit prior to the plan. After: PageSpeed Insights, one run per URL on October 12, 2026. Average LCP barely moved in this phase (6.0 s to 5.8 s): its causes were different and were handled in phase 2.

Decision 2 · Images and layout shifts

No lazy loading on the hero and reserved image sizes: LCP from 5.1 s to 1.4 s and CLS 0 on the 6 control URLs

Since phase 2, Medipro has a 1.4 s LCP on /ia-para-consultorios-medicos/ (down from 5.1 s) and CLS 0 on its 6 control URLs. Before, on the service hubs the main image was lazy-loaded and arrived late; blog cards and article images had no width or height, so the content jumped as they loaded. Phase 2 removed lazy loading from the hero, reserved space for every image and kept the Lordicon script only on the 4 pages that use it (it used to load on all 41).

URL	Performance	LCP	CLS
/servicios/	90 → 96	2.1 → 1.4 s	0.158 → 0
/ia-para-consultorios-medicos/	72 → 96	5.1 → 1.4 s	0 → 0
/en/services/	92 → 98	2.4 → 1.4 s	0.138 → 0

Source: mobile PageSpeed Insights, October 12, 2026, post-phase-1 state versus the best of two runs after phase 2. The other 3 control URLs ended between 98 and 100.

Decision 3 · Unused CSS

165 CSS rules from an earlier medical directory removed, and a single 20.9 KiB render-blocking stylesheet

Medipro was loading 165 CSS rules no page used, because the site started in January 2026 as a patient-facing medical directory and still carried that stage's CSS: a treatment search and listing, an old "for doctors" page and utilities nobody used. Phase 3 deleted 165 rules, left a single stylesheet blocking the paint and measured it with the same compiled site before and after, on the same machine, with third-party scripts blocked.

URL	FCP before → after	Performance
/	1.66 → 1.36 s	94 → 95
/servicios/	1.50 → 1.36 s	96 → 97
/ia-para-consultorios-medicos/	1.65 → 1.37 s	94 → 95
Article on booking more appointments from the front desk	1.96 → 1.36 s	93 → 97

Source: Lighthouse 12.8, simulated mobile, median of 3 runs per URL, October 12, 2026.