Corporate / Agency
Codelabs — Dubai Software Agency Site
Hand-built PHP marketing site for a Dubai software agency: ~90 pages across services, case studies and blog, engineered around Core Web Vitals.
- PHP
- Custom PHP Templates
- JavaScript (ES6+)
- jQuery
- Bootstrap
- Cloudflare
- Core Web Vitals
- SEO
- Client
- Codelabs Private Limited
- Duration
- Apr 2021 — Dec 2021
- Category
- Corporate / Agency
Codelabs is a Dubai software agency covering web and mobile development, custom software, cloud, IoT, video analytics, digital marketing, product design and agentic AI for 100+ businesses across the UAE. The site is a hand-built PHP application — templated partials rather than a CMS — served behind Cloudflare.
At roughly ninety pages across services, case studies, pricing, team, careers and blog, the interesting engineering is in the shared header: every page pays the cost of whatever it preloads. The hero video preload is opt-in per page rather than global, so the ~85 pages that never render it stop competing for bandwidth with their own LCP element, and third-party connections are split between a small number of real preconnects and cheaper DNS prefetch for everything else.
For an agency selling engineering competence, the site's own performance is part of the pitch — a slow agency site undercuts the argument before anyone reads it.
Key features
~90 page marketing site across services, case studies, blog and careers
Templated PHP partials with per-page opt-in for expensive preloads
Core Web Vitals tuning — LCP-aware preloading and connection budgeting
Deliberate preconnect budget with DNS prefetch for secondary origins
Service, pricing, case study and team content architecture
Cloudflare CDN with edge caching
My role
Frontend and PHP developer on the site.
- Built page templates and shared partials across the service and content surface
- Reworked the shared header so heavy preloads are opt-in per page
- Tuned Core Web Vitals — LCP, resource hints and third-party connection budget
- Maintained content sections and shipped new service and case study pages
Challenges & solutions
A shared header that taxed every page. An unconditional hero-video preload meant ~85 pages fetched 190KB at high priority for an image they never rendered, competing with their real LCP element. Making it opt-in per page removed the cost everywhere it was not earned.
Resource hints are not free. Each preconnect holds a real connection open, so only three origins get one and everything else falls back to DNS prefetch — the cheap half of the win without the connection churn.
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