My platform now serves a community of more than 85 million users, and the surge in traffic has pushed page load times beyond what I consider acceptable. I want to focus squarely on performance and speed—particularly the time it takes for a page to become interactive after a user hits any URL. I will grant you full access to the staging environment, Lighthouse reports, and the current stack documentation. Your first task is to pinpoint the bottlenecks that slow the initial render. Typical areas include asset bundling, database look-ups, inefficient API calls, and poorly configured caching layers, but I’m open to whatever your investigation uncovers. Deliverables • A concise audit outlining each performance issue, its root cause, and the severity of impact on load time. • A clear, prioritized action plan that I can approve before code changes begin. • Optimized code, query tweaks, or infrastructure adjustments implemented in the staging branch and documented with comments or change logs. • Post-optimization benchmarks (e.g., Lighthouse, WebPageTest, or GTmetrix) showing at least a 30 % reduction in First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive on the ten busiest pages. • A hand-off note with any ongoing monitoring recommendations, so future regressions are easy to detect. Acceptance Criteria • Median First Contentful Paint ≤ 2 s on desktop and mobile over three independent test runs. • No regressions in existing functionality, confirmed by the current automated test suite. • All changes merged through pull requests reviewed by at least one member of my team. Please outline which profiling tools—such as Chrome DevTools, New Relic, or AWS CloudWatch—you prefer, and give a brief timeline for the audit phase and the optimization phase.