The Architecture Behind a 100/100 Lighthouse Django Site

Performance is a feature

Every 100ms of latency costs conversions. Our recipe:

The stack

1. Django + PostgreSQL — boring, fast, reliable
2. Redis — caching everything cacheable
3. HTMX — interactivity without a JavaScript bundle
4. Nginx + Gunicorn — battle-tested serving

The techniques

• Lazy-load every image below the fold
• Inline critical CSS, defer the rest
• Database queries: select_related everywhere it matters
• Static assets fingerprinted and cached forever

The result: sub-second loads on 3G and perfect Core Web Vitals.