Sites rarely go stale because the code was bad. They go stale because changing a phone number requires emailing somebody who has left the company. Six months on, the team is working around the website rather than with it, and it quietly becomes a brochure nobody internally trusts enough to send anyone to.
So an unglamorous question comes early in every project: who is going to edit this, and how often? A five-page site the office manager can update confidently beats a beautiful one that needs a developer for a paragraph change. That single answer shapes the stack more than any technical preference we hold.
The performance conversation has at least become concrete. Core Web Vitals gave everyone real thresholds to hit — largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint under 200 milliseconds, cumulative layout shift under 0.1 — and most traffic in India arrives on a mid-range Android phone over an uneven connection, not on the laptop the design was signed off on. We test on the phone.
One more thing we put in writing at the start: you own the domain, the hosting, the repository and the analytics. We have untangled enough businesses held hostage by a previous developer's registrar login to treat that as a term rather than a courtesy.
